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Thoughts on Enclosure and the Poetry of John Clare
Mia Smith
Leon M. Goldstein High School
Brooklyn, NY
2012 NEH Seminar for School Teachers
Historical Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in Britain
I can start with a litany of recriminations about the effects of entitlement, a narrow work
ethic, greed and competition, and materialism and stagnation. Yet, partial truth gets us nowhere.
And I believe most of us would agree that when we increase knowledge, we increase sorrow.
(Ecclesiastes, 1:18) This was the case for John Clare, who was “accused of imitating Crabbe,”
but would more rightly have seen himself as “free of the gentry attitudes (or ‘moral weight’) of
Crabbe.” (Clare, Cottage Tales, ix-x) There is grave anguish, not recrimination or righteousness
in Clare’s work as he was “in effect writing the epitaph of that culture which was for them (Clare
and other contributors to Time’s Telescope) the object of an alienated curiosity.”(Clare, Cottage
Tales, xvi) As Robinson wrote in his introduction to Cottage Tales, much of the catalogued
detail about village life documented in Clare’s poetry “belonged to pre- enclosure days ……and
thus beyond rescue in terms of practice.”(xvi-xvii) For John Clare, the enclosure movement
triggered desperation to give voice to the natural world he respected. In his journals and poems,
he challenged the grand schemes to enclosure beauty and imagination, to reify nature, to sanitize
and pervert ecological realities, and to dampen the power of voice to stir egalitarianism. His bird
poetry and “I Am” focused on being, perhaps, what he believed pacified insatiable desire and his
journals focused on the local which the elite saw as provincial and even ignoble.
Honeyman noted the systematic exclusion of women from the public sphere, the
gendering of technology, and the definition of skill as work women “did not do.”(62). As women
sought outlets for their anger by hurling flint stone through windows, their form of expression
was vehemently censured with placards aligning peaceful conduct and manhood. Here, women
were pigeonholed as irrational, volatile and unskilled at civil discourse. In addition, Barbara
Hammond when speaking of the Enclosure Acts said, “Civilisation, in this and other guises was
rapidly painting the green spaces black on the industrial map. Manchester still had her
meadows,” but (45) the ecosystem was dying. Othering whether it be male or female, innate or
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acquired skill, cultivated or organic order engenders antagonism where the separate forces rarely
collaborate to decode their co-existence. It is here where John Clare excelled and his exactitude
about the creatures that comprised his world was keenly documented.
Clare not only listed the bird calls – such as “the firetail’s ‘tweet tut’, the spider catcher’s
“eejip eejip’, the chiff- chaff’s “chipichap,” (Clare, John Clare’s Birds, xiii) but he also defined
the context and unraveling of voice such as with his observations of the wood-pigeon’s
behavior: “And sits for hours at ‘coo, coo coo’ / Still ending stuntly with a ‘huff’ (Clare, John
Clare’s Birds, xiii- A47, 19) or his attempt to mimic the song of the nightingale in The Progress
of Rhyme.
As if it was a stranger bird
Wew wew wew wew chur chur chur chur
Woo it woo it could this be her
Tee rew tee tee rew tee rew
Will will will will grig grig grig grig
The boy stopt sudden on the brig
To hear the tweet tweet tweet so shill
Then jug jug jug jug (till a)ll was still
A minute when a wilder strain
Made boys and woods to pause again.
(Clare, John Clare’s Birds, xiii-A53, unnumbered)
Not only did Clare reveal the shifting urgency of the bird’s repertoire but also the boy’s wonder.
Throughout his journals, he noted the calls, their form and the circumstances and delineated the
actions whether it be “the crow flopping on from wood to wood” (Clare, Selected Poems and
Prose of John Clare, 138) or “The blackbird closely sits upon her nest/ To hide her young brood
from the rainy day.” (Clare, John Clare’s Birds, 25-A57, 10) In his notes about the Bunting
Lark, he first described a maiden’s gown touching the groundlark’s nest and then a schoolboy
kicking the grass near it, but both had been unaware of the nest until the empty nest was found
when mowing the hayfield. To the maiden and the boy, the cohabitant, the groundlark, was
invisible and the threat they imposed expected, even justified. For Clare, it was his quest “to see”
the local and to voice its history whether it was the yellow hammer fluttering in “short fears/
From of its nest hid in the grasses rank” (Clare, John Clare’s Birds, 31- N17, 123) or the “noisy”
boys stealing her eggs daily “And still she lays as none were taen away.”(Clare, John Clare’s
Birds, 31- A61, 8) To compare the writings of Clare with those of Richard Jefferies, a naturalist
a generation later after enclosure, any amateur can see the destruction and Clare’s will to give
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voice to the flora and fauna of his locale. Moreover, “Druce, the historian of
Northhamptonshire’s flora, was able to identify 135 plant species from Clare’s poems and found
that no fewer than forty had not been recorded by earlier botanists.”(John Clare’s Birds, xix)
Allen argued that “the enclosure movement was peripheral to England’s economic
development,” (127) and yet, at the time, Lord Ernle’s rhetoric demonized tradition and open
field farmers. Hammond stated that the workingman was “not to think for himself” and his
virtues, “the imagination that inspires a vision of a better society, the sympathy that prompts acts
of comradeship, the public spirit that drives a man to denounce abuses or to lead a movement”
were deemed troubling. (Hammond, 325) In chapter two, “Murdering the Innocents” of Hard
Times, Sissy Jupe’s sensitivity to beauty attracted her to flowers, but she was scoffed at by Mr.
Gradgrind, who couldn’t understand the authority of beauty. The list of things to which his
children would never be exposed from the man in the moon to nursery rhymes are darkly
humorous since the story poignantly shows the joy and comfort that Sissy’s gentle imagination
offered. “But to see it (Louisa’s heart), he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers
he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity
which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be
sounded.”(Dickens, 132) Yet, “to see” is to be transfigured, but Gradgrind was no visionary in
the Blakean tradition who could “create- precisely by seeing – not merely the mundane world of
‘Generation’ but a world in which Generation’s mundane and material ‘objects’ of perception are
transfigured.” (Makdisi, 168) Here, there may be hints that the imagination is incorruptible and
immortal.
Like Blake, Clare “advocates (d) innocence as a form of protest against organized cruelty
and oppression.”(McKusick, Green Writing Romanticism and Ecology, 79) Clare loved his
childhood and he wrote about the disappearance or appropriation of the fields and “waste” lands
near his home in Helpstone. The memory and detail in the lines below spontaneously escalate to
displace the desolation evident in Helpstone.
Where flourish’d many a bush & many a tree
Where once the brook (for now the brook is gone)
Oer pebbles dimpling sweet went wimpering on
Oft on whose oaken plank I’ve wondering stood
(That led a pathway o’er its gentle flood)
To see the beetles their wild mazes run
With getty jackets glittering in the sun
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The repetition of “where” and “many” and the assonance of the “o” gently move the reader along in
the verdant open field only to make her stop disquietingly at the bracketed text where she discovers
that the brook and the future, the “path o’er,” are both gone, but the inter-connectivity of all things
and the transient moment are eternal. Clare saw himself as an “inquisitive” creature engaged in his
ordinary activities. In many of his poems, there tended to be no setting of the scene, no picturesque
manner, but rather a collage of detail, close up, random, and anecdotally presented. The “ecolect”
reflected local environmental conditions and mirrored a village custom “to stick a piece of
greenwards full of field flowers and place it as an ornament in their cottage…… a miniature
version of the surrounding ecosystem.”(McKusick, Green Writing, 89) The title of one of his
collections, The Midsummer Cushion, named this practice and adopted it as a stylistic tool. He told
us that “I found this poem in the field/ And only wrote it down” and here he “re-literalizes(d) the
prevailing Romantic metaphor of organic unity, thereby declaring his intention to gather the wild
flowers of ‘poesy’ in a collection that reflects(ed) the vital disorder of the natural world, rather than
imposing a cold rational arrangement.”(McKusick, Green Writing, 90) The example below shows
the effects of this communion.
Just by the wooden brig a bird flew up,
Frit by the cowboy as he scrambled down
To reach the misty dewberry—let us stoop
And seek its nest—the brook we need not dread,
Tis scarcely deep enough a bee to drown,
So it sings harmless o'er its pebbly bed
—Ay here it is, (Yellow Hammer’s Nest, l. 1-6)
The synergy between boy and nature erupts in discovery; the moment is poignantly profound and
utterly free. This boy experiences, but is not a collector of facts.
Clare was greatly anguished by men who objectified nature for human ends. Hobsbawm
stated that the novelty was not in the innovations, but in the willingness and practicality of the men
to find applications for older, available science and technology and these scientists “refused to make
the subsequent distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ thought.” (Hobsbawm, 38) Here,
Hobsbawm was purely making a scientific distinction, but if this otherness was ignored, it was and
is an ethical quagmire. And, for Clare this streamlined myopia was troubling and “he denounces(d)
the ‘man of science’ whose mania for specimen- collecting leads (led) to cruelty rather than
knowledge: ‘While he unconscious gibbets(ed) butterflyes/ & strangles(d) beetles all to make us
wise.’ This now ‘man of science’ with his narrowly taxonomic view of nature, is (was) unconscious
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of the symbiosis of all species in the local ecosystem.” (McKusick, Green Writing, 82) In The
Lament of Swordy Well, he protested when a local wetland which had rare species of orchids was
converted to arable land. In the poem, the wetland laments the incursion into its ecosystem and
mourns the loss of flora that flourished. (McKusick, Green Writing, 86) Clare spoke directly for the
land giving it voice: “In swordy well a piece of land/ Thats fell upon the town/ Who worked me till
I couldn’t stand/ And crush me now in down.” (Lament of Swordy Well) Moreover, he “bitterly
describes (d) how every bit of sand and gravel was (had been) carried away ‘in bags and carts’ until
‘now they’ve (had) got the land’ that formerly (had) supported ‘flowers that (had) bloomed nowhere
beside.’ Now Swordy Well is (was) barren.” (McKusick, Green Writing, 150) His outrage was
unmistakable as he denounced the selfish motives behind the destruction. Unlike memorializing– a
Wordsworthian aesthetic that exploitatively catalogued what had been lost- Clare’s stark tone
unpretentiously elegized. Clare attempted to elegize not himself,
but the neighborhood, and that focus presented its own potential project; ‘I have been
thinking to-day of all the large trees…….. to include local oral history, the spoken record
of ‘old Will Tyers’ in the case of the walnut,’ with the clear assumption that some trees
held such significance that many individual histories would be required to create the
complex, and necessarily incomplete, history of its life and presence. (Vardy, John Clare
Politics and Poetry, 157)
His botanical knowledge and his passion for Helpstone surely deepened the “cultural and poetic
magnitude of his loss” (Vardy, John Clare Politics and Poetry, 157) and encourages us to
mindfully observe.
Moreover, he denounced the killing of wildlife by people- identifying with the
creatures. In the Badger, Clare documented humans tormenting a badger. Frightened it bit and
the drunken men cursed and laughed while mothers dragged their sons away, and when the
badger escaped, the dogs were released again. Finally, spent, the badger “drives the crowd
again; / Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies/ And leaves his hold and cackles, groans, and
dies.” (l. 50-52) Not only did Clare give voice to “to the powerless victims of human violence
and wanton environmental destruction” (85) but he drew our attention to “the ecological balance
revealed in this tense interaction of predators and prey.”(McKusick, Green Writing, 84) In The
Vixen, young boys baited an old fox who was protecting her young, but when all was still the fox
“start(ed) and snap (ped) at blackbirds bouncing by/ To fight and catch the great white
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butterfly.”(l. 13-14) Here, there is no sentimental anthropomorphism typical of a 19th century
accounts of predators and prey. Clare spoke “directly for Earth, and its creatures, attributing
intrinsic value to all the flora and fauna that constitutes (d) the local ecosystem.” (McKusick,
Green Writing, 85) For Clare, to sanitize nature’s essence or euphemistically to describe man’s
engagement with it would fragment the “symbiotic association with all the creatures that
surround(ed) and nourish(ed)” the dwelling place, and for Clare, when man or creature or flora
was “torn from this living context, the organism faded into a ‘withering thought,’ a ‘shadow’ of
its former self, devoid of beauty or purpose.” (McKusick, Green Writing, 83)
In The Mores, Clare’s quest of the “following eye” (l. 7) to uncover the “prospects” (l.
9) of the “uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey” (l. 5) was unimpeded. He reminisced
about his “boyish hours (l. 9) in which “unbounded freedom ruled” (l. 5) and where the
“wandering scene” (l. 5) met the “circling sky.”(l. 9) Yet, Clare lamented when “fence (s) now
meet (met) fence(s) in owners’ little bounds.”(l. 14) And he noted that the glory of the
unbounded dissipated into a litany of diminutive fragments, “parcels,” “minds,” (l. 16) and
“path(s)”(l. 18) which culminated in “morning leading night astray.”(l. 19)
Not only was he averse to being bounded, but Clare’s concept of language was also local,
organic, and non- standard. Reviews attacked Clara’s use of dialect as ‘mere vulgarisms’ and
reiterated that dialect such as ‘egg on’ and ‘flops’ should not only be removed from ‘poetical
lexicon,’ but also from polite conversation.” (McKusick, John Clare and the Tyranny of
Grammar, 256) In notes to an 1819 manuscript, Clare redefined vulgarity to be democratic and
argued that nature’s language never repelled readers. Clare’s resistance to reify nature and to
sanitize his language was profound and irksome to his Victorian audience. “The Scottish dialect
having distinct national character, poses (d) a threat to English national identity. If the ‘rustic’ of
Northamptonshire, Lancashire, and Somersetshire are (were) allowed to publish their local
dialects, the cultural and linguistic hegemony of London will (would) be exposed and eventually
destabilized.”(McKusick, John Clare and the Tyranny of Grammar, 257) In Winter, the poem
that follows, Clare refused to standardize his text.
Nature’s all withered to the root, her printer
To decay that neer comes back
Winds burst, then drop
Flowers, leaves and colours, nothing’s left to hint her
Spring, Summer, Autumn’s, withered into winter
(Clare, Late Poems of John Clare, 813)
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The minimalistic language reinforces the withering landscape. Moreover, the syntactical
structure of the poem is devoid of essential verbs and conjunctions adding to the ambiguity of
lines and of nature. “It is unclear whether ‘Flowers, leaves and colours’ are the objects of the
verb ‘drop,’ or an appositive construction to ‘nothing’- - or perhaps both. And……. The phrase
‘her printer’ dangles mysteriously.” (McKusick, John Clare and the Tyranny of Grammar, 276)
In new publications of Clare’s work which are faithful to Clare’s original manuscripts, “Clare’s
conception of language and his conception of landscape seem closely related; he regarded both
as ideally constituting an unrestricted communal zone, open to local browsing and free from the
linearity, exclusivity, and standardization imposed by outside authorities.” (Brownlow, 92-93)
Just as Honeywell argued that “respectability” became central in the creation of gender roles, and
more poignantly that “the language of respectable manhood became fundamental to public
political action, as a narrow, male, vision of class replaced egalitarianism” (143), Clare used his
poetry to resists the standardization of respectability, the homogenization of the local identity,
and a sentimental, sanitized vision of the dwelling place.
Clare mourned, “Yet what with stone pits delving holes/ And strife to buy and sell/ My
name will quick be the whole” (The Lament of Swordy Well), knowing neither the meeting place
where he engaged his surroundings nor the community that shared that experience with him
existed anymore. This communion was merely an “epitaph of a culture.” And yet, he persisted to
name a world that was gone and yet not gone. In The Pewits Nest from his middle period, he
described the scant pewit’s nest, a bare spot on the earth, to embody the “paradoxical bounty
within apparent poverty.” (McKusick, Green Writing, 91) The pewit adapted, its nest to be
harsh, but adequate for the “dingy dirty green” eggs just as “the poem’s blunt astringent language
seems equally well adapted to the depiction of such creatures, eking out a frugal existence on the
margin of agricultural ‘progress.’”(McKusick, Green Writing, 92) Clare was more capable than
Wordsworth in using “plainer and more emphatic language” and to imbue “common life” with
realistic beauty. (Wordsworth, 7) In Sand Martin, Clare’s first word of the poem, “thou,” erodes
that distinction between human and non- human and in its place substitutes a fraternal bond as
the bird and the man are both secluded. There is no objectifying external view here. More
notably, in his journals, he wrote knowledgeably about an indictment of two gypsies for horsestealing quoting the Justice of the Peace whose charged diction - “atrosious tribe of vagabonds,”
“outlaws,” “exterminated from the face of the earth”- revealed not only his “unfeeling,” but
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prejudice nature. Clare went on to explain the gypsy’s “mystic language” as nothing more than
“slang names like village provincialism,” their “black arts” as nothing more than the fear
mongering and gossip of the villagers, and other small observations and discoveries. (Clare,
Autobiographical Writing, 69) He told a story of how he gained their trust:
I had often noticed that the men had a crooked finger on one hand nor would they satisfy
my enquires till confidence made them more familiar and them I found the secret was
that their parents disabled the finger of every male child in war time when infants to keep
them for being drawn for Militia or being sent for soldiers for any petty theft. (Clare,
Autobiographical Writing, 71)
In these examples, each being lived according to his/ its needs, features, and instinctive
preferences. Clare neither sanitized his beings’ behaviors, nor unequivocally defined their place.
His beings related to their context and that became their place; so, for him, place was a thing and
yet, it was not. Clare recorded details of these beings in their niches to fight for egalitarianism
for each being’s role and against a homogenizing standard of roles and ways of being.
Like Ruskin who was thirty years Clare’s senior, Clare’s childhood passion for
mountains and meadows and his “scientific eye for detail” empowered him to document a
“geographical imagination” and a “cultural geography.” (Sprinker, 46) Yet, unlike Ruskin's
understanding of landscape as a “theocentric aesthetic” (Sprinker, 46) symbolic and indicative of
the goodness and beauty of the divine, Clare's vision was not evidential or external but rather
sublimely neutral and called for an erasure of the divide between locale and being.
Fundamentally, the greatest difference seems to be in their visions of humility; for Ruskin,
environment was a tool that evoked mindsets and identified man's place in God's order of nature,
while for Clare, engagement created both man and landscape and it was there, in the meeting
place, where both knowledge and being resided. (Sprinker, 47) For Ruskin, humility was
submission and obedience, but for Clare, it was being and communion. Moreover, for Ruskin,
the imaginative powers of the Romantics cleansed but if longed for, defiled. (Ruskin, xxvii, 603)
In Clare’s The Instinct of Hope, the speaker begins by asking whether there is another place for
“this frail dust” (1) and ends by asking whether man has the same resilience of a violet,
associated with delicate love and humility, to “die unworthy of a second spring.”(14) (Clare,
Poems of John Clare, 151) It is between these two questions where Clare’s speaker tells us that
“everything seems struggling to explain,” (6) that time will “find a resting place,” (10) and the
violet senses a “future power.”(11) The anxiety that is time’s is the speaker’s only briefly, but its
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pervasive sorrow is profoundly destabilizing. Even though this poem seems to be about nature,
it is much grander advocating man’s communion with his niche for the reciprocal dialogue
defines being for both self and site where there is no hierarchy distinguishing the cultured from
the vulgar, the defiling from the pure, the strong from the delicate, the finite from the infinite.
Even though, for Clare, there was the potential for this grand communion, there was
specificity- nuanced and precise. And this specificity that he described, with telling exactitude,
was diverse and local. His detail attested to his deference for locality. When describing the
passerine birds building nests in his journals, he documented these three accounts,
1.A pert bird builds its nest in hedge and thickets of dead grass and moss without side and
adds a lair of cow dung and lines it with grass of finer sorts now and then inserting a few
oak leave it lays five eggs of greenish ash color thickly freckled with brunny spots
………….2. the green linnet builds in thorn bushes makes a rather clumsey nest of moss
and dead airiff stalks and wool lined with cow hair and wool lays five eggs longish of
white color faintly spotted with red and purple spots at the long end ………..3. Yellow
Hammer a bold bird builds its nest on the ground and in low bushes of dead grass and
twitch and lines it with horse hair lays five eggs of a fleshy ask color streaked all over
with black crooked lines as if done with a pen and for this it is often called the ‘writing
lark’..[A46, 166] (Clare, John Clare’s Birds, 22- 29)
With great care, Clare documented how each bird survived and drew from its environment. Each
quote above is deeply local and Miller argued in his article, Enclosure and Taxonomy in John
Clare, that all beings construct the “irregularity” of different sites collaboratively. “In The
Village Minstrel (1821), Clare’s protagonist, Lubin, makes a Parassus out of a molehill: ‘Upon a
molehill of the dropt him down/ To take a prospect of the circling scene.’” (Miller, 643) For
Clare, the meeting place was an experiential moment on the cusp of an unraveling. And when
this moment dissipated, he asked whether it was the milieu or the larger community’s ability to
articulate its relevance that disappeared. This goes directly to Clare’s chastisement of science’s
preoccupation with naming. For Clare, scientists identified and classified, but didn’t know. Yet,
Clare had an intrinsic capacity to rest in the meeting place unencumbered. His journals and
poems documented his mourning over encounters lost and his longing for release from physical
and spiritual sublimation. Unlike Descartes, who needed comfort to ruminate on being, and
hence wrote, “I am here, clothed in a dressing gown, and sitting by the fire,” (18) the speaker in
Clare’s I Am is merely being and there seems to be an erasure of the Cartesian premise of doubt.
(Morton, 188) In Morton’s analysis of I Am, Morton questioned whether the speaker is “lying
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with the sky above him, or lying ‘above the vaulted sky’ in heaven.”(189) The reader witnesses
the process endured to arrive at this meeting place of being where the speaker’s “identity has
shrunk to the pure open empty set of blank consciousness, filled with ambient noises and
disturbing otherness.”(189). Secondly, Morton said that there is the gap between stanzas one and
two where the “the reader's eyes have to ‘toss’ themselves into the nothingness….. between lines
in order to arrive at the end of the phrase” (190) - “noise.” (Clare, I Am, l.7) Then, the speaker
and the reader, as the reader identifies with the speaker’s struggle, are cast into the nothingnesssuspended there. Finally, the dashes used in stanzas two and three “become the sheer inert breath
between signs and enclose the doubt” and connect “the grass and the sky to depression and
doubt.” (Morton, 190) Clare knew his circumstances, their intricacies and “the Otherness that
surrounds(ed) him does (did) not truly exist.”(Morton, 190) The rustic environment and voice of
his speaker was a poetic trope where nature “was itself a displacement from normative village
life.” (Morton, 191 reference to Bate, 206) Clare's community no matter its feudalistic politics
had already experienced incursions and othering that had shaped and shattered visions of Clare's
being. Clare asked his readership to be in the meeting place where locality and class would gain
a deeper clarity about their incursions.
“To understand what Clara mourns(ed) is to discover new possibilities for the elegiac
voice.” (Vardy, Clare’s Natural History Prose Elegies, 137) Moreover, Vardy wrote of a
passage in Clare’s journal: “His intention to ‘walk in the fields’ was disrupted by the landlord’s
removing the ‘woodstile,’ an unobtrusive device for going over a fence, which conveyed the
freedom to ramble.....Clare emphasized the ancientness of this right by naturalizing the manmade object as a thing ‘akin to nature,’ ….perhaps even converting them into nature over time.”
More poignantly, Clare wrote in Childhood, “I seek no more the finch’s nest, / Nor stoop for
daisy flowers; / I grow a stranger to myself.” This may be the very place where he challenged the
concept of enclosure and cosmopolitans who engage in it. He neither ask them to harken back to
the past as other Romantic poets nor to love what he loved, but rather to be keenly aware of the
reciprocity of site and self and acknowledge it magnitude and necessity when dictating a global
order. He seemed to be pained by the loss of his rights and nature’s right to experience an
exchange that sustained and satiated them both. Within the microcosm of which Clare wrote, he
unsentimentally documented life, death, transfiguration and the importance of individual
function. From this exploration, we must acknowledge that locality and place are problematic
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and contextual; and more importantly, we must consider how a global environment can sustain a
vital exchange where there is reciprocity of both ideas and commerce if locality decays and is
homogenized. “As for Heidegger, place is at once the very opposite of closing or closure. Place
is the aperture of Being (“Origin” 54-55), and yet it is at risk of becoming a component of fascist
ideology, of the sort suggested by the idea of Lebensraum, a locality meant for a certain race or
class.”(Morton, 183) Clare would agree that place is “the aperture of Being,” and being the voice
of the commoner and the common lands, he seems, to ask us, today, to moderate the exchange
between the local and the global with deference to the other, with keen observation not
dominance or eradication and knowing that place and being are constructs of sustained
collaboration and identification.
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p. 179-193.
Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. Edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols.
London: Library Edition, George Allen, n.d. 1903-13.
Sprinker, Michael. Ruskin on the Imagination. Studies in Romanticism. Vol. 18, No. 1, Victorian
Romanticism II
(Spring 1979): 115-139.
Tibble, John and Anne Tibble. John Clare: His Life and Poetry. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.,
1956.
Vardy, Alan D. John Clare, Politics and Poetry. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
Vardy, Alan D. Clare’s Natural History Prose Elegies.
Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. Edited by R.L. Brett and A. R. Jones, rev ed. London and New
York, 1965.
Note: copies of the following poems- Yellow Hammer Nest, The Badger, Mores and Vixen are all
from online. Sand Martin, Childhood, The Lament of Swordy Well, Helpstone and Winter are
from different poetry collections of John Clare.