The Great Poets – John Clare

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What to expect

John Clare was the forgotten Romantic poet, until the late twentieth century. Known by his contemporaries as the ‘Peasant Poet’ he recorded in his poems the natural landscape of rural England before the Industrial Revolution. His poems rival Wordsworth’s for their sensitivity to nature and pantheism: ‘I feel a beautiful providence ever about me,’ Clare wrote. But his life was a long struggle against poverty and mental collapse. Some of his finest poems were written in the local asylum.

Critics Review

Even many people who know poetry aren’t familiar with John Clare. Why listen to this reading of some of his work, then? ‘The Peasant Poet’, as he was known, fit in with his contemporaries, the Romantics, but, unlike them, his knowledge of nature was from working in it, not strolling in it. Narrator David Shaw-Parker takes advantage of the poetry’s strong structural elements and uses emphasis to aid interpretation. He also varies his voice to match the tone of each poem – from the pure rustic to the elevated, almost erudite, tone Clare sometimes achieved despite his almost total lack of formal education. This is a fine introduction to Clare’s work.

D.M.H., AudioFile

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