“The Poet in His Joy” – towards a realization of happiness in poetics through John Clare

Clare is such a joy to read, and is probably my favorite Romantic poet next to Blake and perhaps only rivaled in some ways by Keats. I loved reading the other blog posts about language and "poesy" in regards to a retrospective on this course. For whatever reason, Clare seems both quintessentially romantic and also totally grounded in this world. 

Most poets this semester encounter some kind of despair, put-on or not, but John Clare, who loved, Jain-esque, the dirt of the world and the insects burrowing in the grass beneath his feet, faced the great sadness of being kept in an insane asylum for the last twenty years of his life. I believe that Clare’s work principally focuses on a sought-after beauty and happiness, though not one, as in Keats, that functions in terms of fancy and imagining, but rather in the materiality of the world. “True poesy is not in words,” he writes in “Pastoral Poesy.” “But images that thoughts express” (1-2). What are the images of which Clare is fond? “The dust mills that the cowboy delves / In banks for dust to run…The morn with saffron strips and gray, / Or blushing to the view, / Like summer fields when run away / In weeds of crimson hue” (21-22 and 69-72). I like Clare because, to me, he seems to resist a kind of intellectual analysis I usually bring forward in my poetry reading – the work is simple, full of color and life, and rests on “humble quietness” (108). The poems seem to match the days we’re now in – light-strewn, grass-bent, work-shy and framed by the patience of trees. I can very much see how these poems may be boring, as their pleasantness doesn’t reach the lofty perfumes of Keats, the drawling narratives of Wordsworth, the smacking heavens and hells of Blake, the metaphysics of Shelley, the dreams of Coleridge, the bawdy-puns of Byron, nor the political concerns of Barbauld. Yet, for whatever reason, the poems of Clare feel the closest to nature in terms of their being “as harmless as a song” (112). We’ve witnessed natural apocalypse and extreme beauty – Clare’s wants the human being as idle witness, as he writes in “The Nightingale’s Nest”: “let the wood gate softly clap, for fear / The noise may drive her from her home of love…For we will have another search to-day, / And hunt this fern-strewn thorn clump round and round / And where this seeded wood grass idly bows, / We’ll wade right through, it is a likely nook” (47-50). Clare’s poems seem a likely nook for these happy days.