ABSTRACT
John Clare, the self-styled 'Northamptonshire Peasant Poet', was a poet of the 'fields' in more ways than one: he himself laboured in the fields; he wrote of the life of field hands; he celebrated the ecology of fields, considered not only as sites of agricultural production but as habitats of mutually dependent plants and animals. The classical definition of 'ecology' is the study of the relationships between living things and their environments. In his poem 'Shadows of Taste', written before the science of ecology was codified and even before the word 'ecology' was coined, Clare provides with a rhymed couplet that anticipates this definition while giving it a wider experiential dimension. Clare's 'hollow trees', also called den trees today, serve as homes for several species of living things. For Clare, natural systems are sites of resistance to the closure of science or to any other form of institutionalized thought.
