Abstract
A number of late Clare poems offer a series of passionate and heartfelt pledges on behalf of a series of often vividly imagined female figures, dramatising the idea of the insufficiency of words in the realm of love. In this, Clare was inspired by the example of Burns’s lyricism and his mastery of song. This chapter argues that, while Clare’s work often, like that of his contemporaries, evidences the complex Romantic reception of Burns, Clare was also quite unlike other Romantics in the extent to which he imitated Burns. What Burns gave Clare was, as both his early and late poems demonstrate, the precedent of hybrid forms of lyric and song that were quite unlike anything available in the English poetic tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
Scottish and Irish Romanticism, p. 146.
- 2.
Scottish and Irish Romanticism, p. 11. Clare also writes a number of poems on variously imagined Irish figures. See, for instance, ‘The flower of Ould Ireland is Kate o’ Killarney’, Later Poems, II, 945; ‘The Irish Emigrant’, Early Poems, II, p. 433; ‘The Scotch and Irish girl’, Later Poems, II, p. 813.
- 3.
Gerard Carruthers, Robert Burns (London: Northcote House, 2005), p. 108.
- 4.
Robert Burns, p. 3.
- 5.
Scottish and Irish Romanticism, p. 147.
- 6.
Nigel Leask, ‘“A Spark o’ Nature’s Fire”: Robert Burns and the Vernacular Muse’, in Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice, ed. by Julie Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), pp. 108‒127 (p. 112).
- 7.
Carol McGuirk, Reading Robert Burns: Texts, Contexts, and Transformations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 1.
- 8.
William Christmas contends that Clare is the ‘culmination’ of this tradition, to which Burns apparently also belongs. See The Lab’ring Muses, pp. 282‒297.
- 9.
On Burns and the reception of Clare, see Mark Storey, ‘Clare and the Critics’, in Clare in Context (Haughton, Phillips, and Summerfield), pp. 22‒50.
- 10.
Ian Bowman, ‘John Clare: The Scottish Connection’, Scots Magazine (1988), 580‒585. Clare’s ‘My heart is in Scotland’, for instance, is contained in Later Poems, I, p. 280.
- 11.
See Bate, Clare: A Biography, pp. 428‒440 and pp. 469‒529.
- 12.
‘Mary’ and ‘Secret Love’ are two among many notable poems in this regard. See Later Poems, I, p. 291; Later Poems, II, p. 891.
- 13.
By Himself, p. 271.
- 14.
Sigi Jӧttkandt, A Phenomenology of the One (Melbourne: Re-Press, 2010), p. 95.
- 15.
William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1818), p. 285.
- 16.
Catalogue of the Clare Collection, p. 28.
- 17.
Letters, p. 517.
- 18.
William Hazlitt, Select British Poets (London: C. Hall, 1824), p. xii.
- 19.
Burns in Global Culture, p. 31.
- 20.
Letters, pp. 412–414 (pp. 412, 413).
- 21.
Pringle was the editor of Friendship’s Offering: some of Clare’s poems were published in this literary annual.
- 22.
Letters, p. 412. As the rest of this letter makes clear, Clare knew Homer from Pope’s translations.
- 23.
Later Poems, I, pp. 306‒307.
- 24.
McGuirk also notes that many of Burns’s songs were ‘often transmitted anonymously’. Reading Burns, p. 1.
- 25.
Michael O’Neill, ‘Mournful Ditties and Merry Measures: Feeling and Form in the Romantic Short Lyric and Song’, in Companion to Romantic Poetry (Mahoney), pp. 9‒25 (p. 9).
- 26.
Bate, Clare: A Biography, p. 12.
- 27.
A Catalogue of the Clare Collection, p. 12.
- 28.
O’Neill, ‘Mournful Ditties and Merry Measures’, p. 10.
- 29.
David Lindley, Lyric (London: Methuen & Co., 1985), p. 27.
- 30.
Roland Carter and John McRae, The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 168.
- 31.
Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: the Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 1‒5 (pp. 3, 85).
- 32.
Burns was, of course, described as the ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ in The Lounger, ed. by H. Mackenzie (Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1786), p. 388.
- 33.
Critical Heritage, p. 105.
- 34.
Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance, p. 60.
- 35.
Leith Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707‒1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 107‒144 (p. 127).
- 36.
For the former view, see Stephen Gill, ‘Wordsworth and Burns’, in Burns and Other Poets, ed. by David Sergeant and Fiona Stafford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 156‒168.
- 37.
Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, p. 34.
- 38.
Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, pp. 108‒109, p. 67.
- 39.
Ronald Blythe, ‘John Clare in Scotland’, John Clare Society Journal, 19 (2000), 73‒81 (p. 75).
- 40.
Goodridge uses the term ‘Scottish lyrics’ for these late Clare poems. See Clare and Community, p. 85.
- 41.
Clare and Community, p. 14.
- 42.
By Himself, pp. 58, 75 115, 185.
- 43.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
- 44.
Allusion to the Poets, pp. 43‒83 (p. 44).
- 45.
Gill, ‘Wordsworth and Burns’, in Burns and Other Poets (Sergeant and Stafford), p. 158.
- 46.
Poems Descriptive, pp. 92–98; Early Poems, I, p. 142.
- 47.
Early Poems, I, pp. 148‒149 (p. 148).
- 48.
Clare’s order was obeyed. See Early Poems, I, pp. 246‒247.
- 49.
William Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 50.
- 50.
Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, p. 670.
- 51.
The Poems of Allan Ramsay, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1800), II, p. 308.
- 52.
Allan Cunningham, The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern, 4 vols (London: John Taylor, 1825), II, pp. 81‒83.
- 53.
Roger Fiske, Scotland in Music: A European Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 159.
- 54.
Later Poems, I, p. 279.
- 55.
Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, repr. 2011), p. 77.
- 56.
Carol McGuirk, Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 127.
- 57.
Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, p. 541.
- 58.
Leopold Damrosch Jr., ‘Burns, Blake, and the Recovery of Lyric’, Studies in Romanticism, 21:4 (1982), 637‒660 (pp. 665‒666, 655).
- 59.
Later Poems, II, p. 1082.
- 60.
See, for instance, ‘I love thee dearly my own bonny Maid’, in Later Poems, II, p. 889.
- 61.
Leon Waldoff, Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics: the Art and Psychology of Self-Representation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), p. 51.
- 62.
Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, pp. 739, 736.
- 63.
See also Robert Burns: Selected Poetry, ed. by Carol McGuirk (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 310.
- 64.
Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics, p. 54.
- 65.
‘Clare in Scotland’, p. 77.
- 66.
Lynne Pearce, ‘John Clare’s Child Harold: The Road Not Taken’, Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed. by Susan Sellers (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 143‒156.
- 67.
‘Clare in Scotland’, p. 78. In the asylum period, Clare wrote hundreds of poems to or about ‘Mary’. For details about Mary Joyce, see Bate, Clare: A Biography, pp. 12, 36.
- 68.
For a concise list of Scottish writers in Clare’s library, see Goodridge and Thornton, ‘Clare: The Trespasser’ (Haughton, Phillips, Summerfield), pp. 127‒128.
- 69.
Later Poems, II, pp. 1083‒1084.
- 70.
Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, p. 682.
- 71.
Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, p. 163.
- 72.
Later Poems, I, pp. 243‒244 (p. 243).
- 73.
Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, pp. 577‒578.
- 74.
‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ and ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ are both printed in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M.H. Abrams (gen. ed.), 6th edn (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), I, pp. 767‒768; pp. 1022‒1023.
- 75.
Selected Poetry, pp. 375, 270.
- 76.
Storey, ‘Clare and the Critics’, pp. 28‒51 (p. 38).
- 77.
Macbeth (Muir), p. 159. The reference is to V.viii.18.
- 78.
Later Poems, I, pp. 20‒21.
- 79.
See: Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, pp. 434‒436 (p. 435) and pp. 190‒192 (p. 192).
- 80.
‘Wit’ (and ‘pathos’) were two of the chief characteristics that Matthew Arnold claimed could be found in Burns. See ‘The Study of Poetry’, from Essays in Criticism: Second Series, in Matthew Arnold: Selected Prose, ed. by Peter J. Keating (London: Penguin, 1970, repr. 1987), pp. 340‒366 (p. 364).
- 81.
Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, pp. 92‒95 (p. 94).
- 82.
Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, p. 641.
- 83.
In Summerfield’s edition, this song is printed after the lyric ‘Love’, described as ‘a thought the sincerest/Any tongue has made known’. See Selected Poetry, pp. 272‒273.
- 84.
Later Poems, I, pp. 285‒286.
- 85.
‘Mournful Ditties and Merry Measures’, p. 23.
- 86.
By Himself, p. 185.
- 87.
Burns and the Sentimental Era, pp. 126‒128 (p. 126).
- 88.
White, ‘Byron, Clare, and Lyric Poetry’, pp. 115‒127.
- 89.
Lynn Pearce, ‘John Clare’s “Child Harold”: A Polyphonic Reading’, Criticism, 31:2 (1989), 139–157 (p. 150).
- 90.
‘Clare’s “Child Harold”’, p. 145.
- 91.
Later Poems, I, p. 277.
- 92.
Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (London: Harvest, 2000), p. 157. See also Lewis, Lyric Impulse, p. 111.
- 93.
W.B. Sedgwick, ‘The Lyric Impulse’, Music & Letters, 5:2 (1924), 97‒102 (p. 101).
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White, A. (2017). Clare and Burns. In: John Clare's Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53859-4_9
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