June 1964: The poet and critic Donald Davie reflects on the genius of John Clare
The poet and critic Donald Davie reflected on the genius of the 19th-century English poet John Clare, whom his biographer Jonathan Bate called "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced".
There will always be sophisticated philistines who prefer, for diagnostic or more dubious reasons, the poems which poets write when out of their wits to the ones they write with their wits about them. Poets nowadays know that it helps their reputations and sales if they can manage a spell in the psychiatric ward. But anyone who goes to poems for poetry and not another thing will prefer the sane Clare of The Shepherd's Calendar to the lunatic Clare whose late poetry can be painfully deciphered from pathetic manuscripts in Northampton, the Bodleian and Peterborough.
Not that the late poems aren't worth the trouble. Every so often they come up with:
"I love to see the shaking twig
Dance till shut of eve."
And even in a scrap like that one can isolate Clare's peculiar purity, in the prosaic word "shaking", so honestly and unfussily Clare's name for what a twig does. It strikes against and qualifies and thereby validates the much less straightforward and yet more commonplace "dance", which follows. "Dance" for what a twig does is a word with a metaphor inside it, an analogy of many analogies; "shaking" stays stubbornly close to the thing it names, and won't let us look away or belong to anything analogous.
And this is the virtue of earlier Clare also. It is the reason behind his use of dialect, which is not for him a valuable resource, an artful freaking of language. He says that robins "tutle" because this is his and his neighbours' name for what robins do, not a mot juste sought for and triumphantly found; not the one exquisitely right word, just the one right one. It is not so far from what Pound applauded in Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, "the merits of the lexicographer", for whom one thing has one name, and only one name.
This shows up in Clare in the conspicuous absence of "elegant variation". If things have fixed names, then the same words will and must recur as often as the same things are spoken of. And so in The Shepherd's Calendar "crackling stubbles" is not embarrassed by the proximity of "crackling stubs", "sliving" does not mind being jostled by "they slive", "splashy fields" naturally provide "splashing sports"; and in the later poems, the poems of madness.
"The rushbeds touched the boiling spring
And dipped and bowed and dipped again
The nodding flower would wobbling hing"
This comes from a poem about Robert Bloomfield, whom Clare called "our English Theocritus", and extolled as a better poet than himself. To compare Clare with Bloomfield, a proletarian poet of the previous generation, was commonplace in Clare's life-time; now they are seldom read together. Indeed Bloomfield is seldom read at all, though he's well worth it. Apart from anything else, readers of Bloomfield are likely to be cautious about seeing Clare as engagé, as a socially committed poet: the June eclogue from The Shepherd's Calendar, which speaks of "the old freedom that was living then/When masters made them merry wi their men," and deplores how "proud distinction makes a wider space/Between the genteel and the vulgar race," is not a direct response to the consequences of agricultural enclosures, but weaves together a series of allusions to the same topic in one of Bloomfield's verse-tales.
And in a more narrowly literary perspective Bloomfield's name is still important. His Farmer's Boy of 1800 is an unabashed and very attractive descendant of Thomson's Seasons; and Thomson was, so the tradition runs (and nothing is more likely), the poet who first inspired Clare. It's true that when Clare uses decasyllabic couplets, as he does in the best parts of The Shepherd's Week (though some of the octosyllabics are also fine), he escapes the characteristically Augustan or post-Popian cadences, as Bloomfield in his verse-tales doesn't. Nevertheless, Clare almost certainly regarded himself as writing in a tradition stemming from Thomson through Bloomfield, as competing therefore for the neo-classical laurels of "English Theocritus", stakes that Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, were not entered for. Accordingly Clare can use the personification, for instance, with Augustan aplomb and wit:
"The ploping guns sharp momentary shock/Which eccho bustles from her cave to mock."
And when in his madness he identified himself with Byron, and tried to write a Childe Harold and a Don Juan, the manoeuvre was not altogether senseless: Byron's special and Augustan kind of Romanticism is the only kind that can be invoked to make Clare any sort of Romantic poet, and indeed the poet who exhorted the "deep and dark blue Ocean" to "roll" shared Clare's attitude to words as names - there are no metaphors hidden in Byron's "deep" and "dark" and "blue", any more than in clare's "shaking" or his "wabbling".
Equally, it did not have to be a Romantic generation which in 1820 made Clare's first book of poems, and its author, "a Northamptonshire peasant", the literary sensation of the season. The 18th century had had its thresher-poets and milkmaid-poetesses, though Bloomfield the shoemaker was the only one before Clare who had enduring talent. (Burns is not in another category, though neither Clare nor Clare's generation realised it.) In fact, the Clare of that first book, of The Village Minstrel which followed it in 1821, and of The Shepherd's Week (1827), was not "Romantic" enough.
The insensitive officiousness of Clare's first publisher, Taylor, whose emasculating revisions the new editors have removed, tells its own tale of what the taste of the 1820s wanted. And Clare's first biographer, Frederick Martin in 1865, thought that it wasn't until 1830 that Clare became "a writer of perfect melodious verse". It was only then, says Martin, that "the outward form came to be mastered by the inward spirit, as clay in the hands of the sculptor." And Martin was no fool, nor anything but a whole-hearted champion of Clare. His Life of John Clare, which is now very properly reissued, has been superseded as scholarship by the Tibbles' John Clare of 1932. But Martin wasn't writing a scholarly book, he was uncovering a scandal, the scandal of Clare's destitution which drove him to the madhouse; and for the sake of Martin's indignation and his resolute naming of names, it's worth putting up with his confident fictionalisings about what no one can know, how Clare felt when he wasn't writing poems. As for the feelings that got into the poems, one can see that from Martin's Victorian-Romantic standpoint, which prized melodiousness and plasticity and subjectivity, Clare's Shepherd's Week was disconcertingly too faithful to the various angularities of a social and physical world irreducibly outside the mind which registered it.
This is not the mistake which modern taste will make. But when we praise Clare for his "observation", we do hardly any better. For as Walter De La Mare said, "more observation will detect the salient sharply enough" but, in Tennyson for instance, it often "crystallises what should be free and fluent with a too precise, an overburdened epithet." Clare never does this. His words are like the words of Edward Thomas, of which De La Mare said:
"They are there for their own sake, of course, but chiefly because the things they represent have been lived with and loved so long that their names are themselves."
This describes not a naive or limited kind of minor poetry, but one kind of great poetry, sane, robust and astringent.