John Clare Connection
John Clare, known as Northamptonshire’s ‘peasant poet’, is considered to be one of the most influential poets of the natural world. He wrote extensively about the nature around him and the difficulties in witnessing it diminish when an inclosure act privatised common land around his home village of Helpston in 1809. He also suffered from poor mental health in his later years, and one wonders whether the absence of nature in his later years contributed to this.
In an episode of Radio 4’s In Our Time, first broadcast in 2017 and now available on BBC Sounds, Melvyn Bragg and guests discussed the John Clare who, according to one of Melvyn’s guests, Jonathan Bate, was ‘the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced’.
Recently, singer songwriter Damon Albarn has talked fondly about John Clare’s poetry and his connection with nature and how it has inspired him.
