Selected Poems / John Clare

John Clare produced some of English poetry’s most poignant and glorious lyrics. Writing not as an observer of nature, but out of an intimate knowledge of the wheatfields, hedgerows and ditches of his village in Northamptonshire, he described animals, insects, trees, rivers, sunlight and clouds with sublime sensitivity. But as enclosures and ‘improvements’ came in the early nineteenth century, dismembering the rural landscape, his later poems became infused with a sense of disorientation and loss, and scattered through with threads of madness. Clare’s genius has been rediscovered by fellow poets in every generation since his death, from Dylan Thomas to Ted Hughes.