Keeping Nature at Bay: John Clare's Poetry of Wonder (Essay‪)‬

THE PREOCCUPATION, AMONG ROMANTIC POETS, WITH THE IDEA OF place, along with a belief in the genius loci and the notion of achieving a heightened sensibility towards nature, have been important topics in Romanticism--especially in studies of Wordsworth, whose Prelude remains a classic example of how a poet's relation to and knowledge of the natural world can influence his creative work. No poet more than John Clare suggests the kind of extreme attentiveness towards nature that might be construed as characterizing the term sensibility in its Romantic (and pre-Romantic) sense. Perhaps this is why most twentieth-century critical accounts of Clare--most notably Harold Bloom's, but more recently eco-critical accounts, too--have placed this lesser-known Romantic poet among the "visionary company" of his more famous contemporaries for having a similar kind of poetics when it comes to writing about nature. (1) But such a comparison is apt only when one reads Clare's most typically "Romantic" or "Wordsworthian" verses, such as the frequently anthologized poem "I Am," to the exclusion of his more than a thousand others (he was an exceedingly prolific poet). Contrary to much of what is written about them, Clare's best poems--his hundreds of short pieces about birds and other farm-side animals and their habitats--often leave the reader questioning how this poet actually relates to the objects he describes. It is precisely Clare's mode of vision (and by this phrase I mean the way that the poet literally sees his environment) that distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries, who more readily pursue a deep and spiritual knowledge of the world around them. Unlike Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale," or Shelley in "Mont Blanc," or Wordsworth in his account of climbing Snowdon at the end of The Prelude, Clare hesitates to seek communion with the natural world, despite his obvious passion for its animals and scenes. Instead, Clare maintains a distance between himself and nature, usually by imbuing his natural descriptions with a sense of wonder rather than claiming any intimate or specialized knowledge of them. (2)