‘This Visionary Theme’: The Rural Muse

Abstract

Clare’s final volume, edited by Taylor and the indefatigable Mrs Emmerson, was published in 1835.¹ The Rural Muse hailed by Edmund Blunden as one of the richest and most melodious volumes of its kind — and decried by Ian Jack as an anticlimax after The Shepherd’s Calendar — was something of a mixed bag.² It could have been a much better book, if Mrs Emmerson had not let her sentimentality influence so strongly her choice of poems from the wealth of manuscript material. Nonetheless there is considerable variety in the volume as it stands: it is almost as though Clare were exulting in a sense of freedom after the difficulties over The Shepherd’s Calendar. There is certainly in many of these poems a confidence that seems to belie the personal agonies that afflicted Clare in the decade leading up to its publication.