Poems and quotations

One of the crests of English literature was the Romantic Movement which rose around 1750 and kept its momentum alive for a century. There were inputs from America via poets such as Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. From the north of Britain came the lines of Robert Burns, who used the vehicle of English as well as the lilting octaves of his native Scots. But the mass of Romantic poetry was the work of a cluster of poets writing in the homeland of the English language. In their era, they appreciated, more than others, the full richnesses of their mother tongue and the sweet cadences which exist in the flow and turn of its redundancies.

One salient occurrence during the Romantic Era of 1750-1850 was the printing of a volume called “Lyrical Ballads.” Penned by Coleridge and Wordsworth, this 1798 volume houses British monuments such as “Tintern Abbey” and “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner.” But the Lyrical Ballads is additionally notable because of the preface which occupies the inches of its ten opening pages. In the evolution of English literature, the preface is a key document because it is a contemplation on the state of English poetry, and also a position statement on the subsequent direction that was being sought by some of its writers. With a publication date that extends back two hundred years, circa 1800, the preface remains accessible to readers from the contemporary era.

Written by Wordsworth at age thirty, and assigned to the 1800 edition of the Ballads, the Preface is his comprehension of the ideas that underlie the Romantic Movement. The vicissitudes in process around 1800 and the preceding half-century undoubtedly influenced the fledgling poet. After spending the last years of the 1700s in a revolution-struck France, Wordsworth had returned to England in 1793, young-bloodedly invigorated by the tempers of anarchy and liberation. Born in 1770, he had accepted into his view a sentiment that had become popular over the late 1700s : that classicism was obsolete and its “high poetic diction” was to be abandoned. Hence the nucleus of Wordsworth’s thesis is that poetry should be bled dry of all affectation and ought instead to espouse the vernacular of the streets and shires. It should be made from “the language of ordinary men.” Political revolts were afoot, American Independence and the French Revolution, and beside these happenings the creative souls of the era, as exampled by Wordsworth, were brimming with an appetite for rawness. Poets were asking their poetry to be raucous and natural.

Via the telescope of retrospection, “Lyrical Ballads” has been called the apex of Wordsworth’s contribution, and he eventually exited the worldly stage in 1850 as Poet Laureate of the nation. As his eighty-year-old body was lowered into a grave in the north of England the torch of the tradition was handed to Tennyson, a gaunt-faced bard of fifty, a Poet Laureate whose compositional cerebrum would be roused not by spring flowers, like the Romantics, but by the fighting protrusions of imperial armies.

In the academic baublings of the last century, the idea which was propagated was that seven poets were the great panjandrums of the Romantic Movement. Professors strutted and aired their chalk-and-talk in echoing rooms, questing as they did for all manner of meanings in the verse of Burns, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth. But the centrifugal force of their orbit was missing an outer ring. Hardly any knew of a poet called John Clare. A rural labourer from the Midlands with only a primordium of literacy – from which he germinated an entire wealth of poetry – Clare endured the matrix of mental illness throughout his life, the last twenty years of which were despairingly spent in the squalor of a Northamptonshire asylum.

It is galling that Clare lay undiscovered for over a hundred years after his death in 1864, for his poetic work was neither exiguous nor lifeless. Shovelling away in the quarries, scholars have unwrapped nine thousand pages of manuscript by Clare, on which run the horizontals of a scrawl that formed over two thousand poems. Impaired by poverty and mental debility, Clare wrote on any oddments of paper that fell into his calloused labouring hands, and proceeded to sew together with needle and thread the hoarded miscellany of papery scraps.

John Clare was from the east Midlands, born in a village near Peterborough, and his introductory memories were those of working beside his father in the fields. After threshing all day, he would earn some pennies to pay for his education at the village school, which he attended till around the age of ten. Two hundred years ago, in 1814, Clare’s entries show that he was aged twenty and roving through meadows north of Peterborough, sitting beside outdoor fires in the evening and cosily listening to the exchange of circulating stories. He would again begin to slink through the pastures, scanning the low English hills, watching the pheasants beak from within the thickets and flap their terse flights from one grazing patch to another. In the earliest suggestions of the autumn, he would grey-eyedly peer at the contours of the trees, weathered by light and decay, the sun-exposed leaves a brassy colour and the underlings still greened by the paint of high summer. He cared to elbow beside a stream and watch the spindly fish yawing in the currents, escaping into the reeds at the merest sign of a moving shadow. With the first railways of the world appearing in England over the early 1800s, this centuries-old way of noiseless pastoral living would be lost forever.

The shape of the Romantic Movement has latterly been revised by the discovery of Clare. The Movement ended not with the publicised burial of William Wordsworth in 1850, but by the sad and obscure loss of John Clare in 1864, a labourer from the Midlands who had only a broken education, who lived in asylums where the mode of care was beatings and starvation, but whose spirit could nevertheless say :

I love the year’s decline, and love
Through rustling yellow shades to range,
O’er stubble land, ‘neath willow grove,
To pause upon each varied change

Beneath a yellow fading tree,
As red suns light thee, autumn-morn
In wildest rapture let me see
The sweets that most thy charms adorn

O while my eye the landscape views,
What countless beauties are display’d;
What varied tints of nameless hues –
Shades endless melting into shade.

Hark! started are some lonely strains:
The robin-bird is urg’d to sing;
Of chilly evening he complains,
And dithering droop his ruffled wing.

Slow o’er the wood the paddock sails;
And mournful, as the storms arise,
His feeble note of sorrow wails
To the unpitying frowning skies.

More coldly blows the autumn-breeze;
Old winter grins a blast between;
The north-winds rise and strip the trees,
And desolation shuts the breeze.

from “Autumn” (1821) by John Clare