John Clare
2003
First Published
4.31
Average Rating
656
Number of Pages
'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.
Avg Rating
4.31
Number of Ratings
146
5 STARS
44%
4 STARS
46%
3 STARS
8%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
0%
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Author
Jonathan Bate
Author · 15 books
Jonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is also Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. A Man Booker Prize judge in 2014. He studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. He has been King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. He is married to author and biographer Paula Byrne. He has also written one novel, The Cure for Love.
