John Clare's Romanticism [Hardcover]

This book offers a major reassessment of John Clares poetry and his position in the Romantic canon. Alert to Clares knowledge of the work of his Romantic contemporaries and near contemporaries, it puts forward the first extended series of comparisons of Clares poetry with texts we now think of as defining the period  in particular poems by Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats. It makes fully evident Clares original contribution to the aesthetic culture of the age by analysing how he explores a wide range of concerns and preoccupations which are central to, and especially privileged in, Romantic-period poetics, including fancy, the sublime, childhood, ruins, joy, poesy, and a love lyric marked by a peculiar self-consciousness about sincere expression. At the heart of this book is the claim that the hitherto under-scrutinised subjective stances, transcendent modes, and abstract qualities of Clares lyric poetry situate him firmly within, and as fundamentally part of, Romanticism, at the same time as his writing constitutes a distinctive contribution to one of the most fascinating eras of English literature.

I Critical Contexts.- Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Reading Romantic Clare.- II Aesthetic Categories and Creative Faculties.- Chapter 3. Clare, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Poetics of Fancy.- Chapter 4. Romantic Spenserianism: Clare, Byron, and Sublime Time.- Chapter 5. As now I gaze: Forms of Visual Experience in Clares Sonnets.- III Imaginative Participations.- Chapter 6. Rural Ruins: Clare, Wordsworth, and Southey.- Chapter 7. Childish Recollections: From Lamb to Byron and Clare.- Chapter 8. Clare, Keats, Poesy, and Joy.- IV The Love Lyric.- Chapter 9. Clare and Burns.- V Conclusion.l��