John Clare

John Clare

by JonathanBate (Author)

Synopsis

`What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world' Seamus Heaney

John Clare (1793-1864) was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth or Shelley - and a life to match. The `poet's poet', he has a place in the national pantheon and, more tangibly, a plaque in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, unveiled in 1989.

Here at last is Clare's full story, from his birth in poverty and employment as an agricultural labourer, via his burgeoning promise as a writer - cultivated under the gaze of rival patrons - and moment of fame, in the company of John Keats, as the toast of literary London, to his final decline into mental illness and the last years of his life, confined in asylums. Clare's ringing voice - quick-witted, passionate, vulnerable, courageous - emerges through extracts from his letters, journals, autobiographical writings and poems, as Jonathan Bate brings this complex man, his revered work and his ribald world, vividly to life.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 640
Edition: Second Impression
Publisher: Picador
Published: 17 Oct 2003

ISBN 10: 0330371061
ISBN 13: 9780330371063

Media Reviews
'Exemplary... wonderfully written and diverse' Peter Ackroyd, The Times 'Splendidly readable... a shrewd, nimbly written book, one of the few of its subject that will be read and enjoyed off campus' Terry Eagleton, Independent
Author Bio
Jonathan Bate, born in 1958, has edited Arden Shakespeare editions and is author of The Genius of Shakespeare, Song of the Earth and a novel, The Cure for Love. He writes regularly for the Telegraph, TLS and Independent and often appears on radio and TV. He lives in the Wirral with his wife and son.