John Clare By Himself (Fyfield Books) - Softcover

Clare, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857542886 ISBN 13: 9781857542882

Publisher: Carcanet Press, 1996

Synopsis

This volume brings together, in definitive form, all Clare's important autobiographical writing.

About this title

From the Back Cover

The story of the life of John Clare (1793-1864) was first set down more than a century ago, and it has captured the imagination of the reading public ever since. It is told most vividly and poignantly in John Clare's own words. In this volume all of Clare's important autobiographical writing is brought together in definitive form. This book extends, corrects and thus replaces the Autobiographical Writings of John Clare edited by Eric Robinson (Oxford, 1983). Clare's Journal is set alongside his Sketches and 'Autobiographical Fragments', as well as his famous 'Journey Out of Essex'. Extracts from his asylum letters are included, his will, and maps of Clare's countryside and his 'Journey'. Ploughboy, gardener's boy and militiaman, lover and husband, acquaintance of Hazlitt, Lamb and Coleridge, 'lunatic': the manifold person of John Clare emerges with great freshness and true voice from this remarkable book. He is a defining figure of our rural tradition. The book includes an Introduction, notes, two maps and a glossary of dialect and unfamiliar words, and is handsomely illustrated with wood engravings by John Lawrence.

About the Author

John Clare (1793-1864): Born the son of a thresher at Helpston, Northamptonshire, John Clare is a rural poet and story teller. He is a poet of spiritual originality, as compelling at his best as Crabbe and Wordsworth as a story teller in verse. He was an assiduous practitioner of the sonnet form at all periods of his poetic career. The sonnets he produced in the last few years before his institutionalisation in 1837, first at High Beech and then in Northampton General Asylum, are of particular interest, since he exploited the inherent brevity of the form to express a simultaneous precision of observation and starkness of vision that he rarely achieved either before or after.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carcanet Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1857542886
• ISBN 13: 9781857542882
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 388