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John Clare and Enclosures

John Clare is one of those poets who had been included in Romantic anthologies rather late (in the 1990s) and it was largely owing to the John Clare Society, established in 1981, that this labouring-class poet from Helpston, Northamptonshire, became interesting to the literary critics. This interest in Romantic working-class poetry was fostered first by the fact that the working-classes were seen as marginal groups and, therefore, had to be reconsidered and second, their poetry, being primarily descriptive of rural life and everyday experiences of ordinary people, was seen as offering valuable insights into the relationship of man and nature, the primary concern of ecological criticism. In that sense, John Clare has long been described as a ‘nature poet’ with strong ecological consciousness, or ‘the poet of environmental crisis’ (George Monbiot in The Guardian, 9 July 2012). This paper seeks to question this attitude through the lens of agrarian capitalism and the practice of enclosures that hit Clare’s part of England in 1809. It seeks to elucidate the connection existing between nature, money and language in a poet who for specific economic reasons marks the end of pastoral poetry.

John Clare, labouring-class literature, enclosures, agrarian capitalism

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