ABSTRACT
John Clare is something of an anomaly in this collection: he was born in 1793, two years before Keats, and by 1830 his publishing career was almost over. The only collection published in our period was The Rural Muse (1835). Clare satisfied the late eighteenth-century taste for unsophisticated rural poetry: Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), The Village Minstrel (1821) and The Shepherd's Calender (1827) are collections that have much in common with Cowper and the early Wordsworth. They brought him a degree of fame, and friendship with men such as Tom Hood, Allan Cunningham, Charles Wentworth Dilke, William Hone and John Taylor (Keats's publisher). His literary roots were older still, in Thomson, Milton, Bunyan and Shakespeare, and he wrote pastiches of Marvell and Sir John Harington without effort because he was spiritually still attached to their world. He may well have been the last English poet to read Donne without any sense of being engaged in a revival or a rediscovery. It is in character that he thought the Hilton portrait of him as a Romantic poet (1820) slightly absurd. His situation was not unlike Crabbe's and Robert Bloomfield's (1766-1823), except that he was less prosperous and well-educated than Crabbe - indeed, he had scarcely any formal education at all - and he was less in contact with urban life than Bloomfield. He was brought up in the remote Northamptonshire village of Helpston, on the edge of the Lincolnshire fens: however, he was a lover of books to the point of bookishness, so that the directness of his poetry is actually a more calculated and admirable artistic triumph than one might suppose. His poetry before the 1830s was largely descriptive: the work of a close observer rather than of a speculative and wide-ranging thinker. Keats, who admired it, nevertheless thought that 'the description overlaid and stifled that which ought to be the prevailing idea'. The Progress of Rhyme is a poetic account of his career and personality.
