John Clare and the bounds of circumstances /

The thesis of Johanne Clare's excellent study is that we cannot disentangle John Clare's aesthetic from his social preoccupations. In this light, the author examines Clare's early and middle poetry (c. 1809-1837), emphasizing how much of it involved an attempt to prevent the values of one class (the gentry) from rigidly determining the style and subject matter of English poetry. This approach illuminates in turn the enclosure elegies, the autobiographical prose, ``The Village Minstrel,'' Clare's use of dialect as part of his approach to language in poetry, and the important ``bird poems'' of the 1830s. Throughout, the author energetically defends Clare's poetry against the persistent charge that it lacks ideas. It is a book that belongs beside the best Clare criticism of recent years: John Barrell's The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (CH, Jun '73), Greg Crossan's A Relish for Eternity (1976), Timothy Brownlow's John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (CH, Dec '83), and Tim Chilcott's ``A Real World and Doubting Mind'' (Hull, England, 1985). For all academic libraries where the Romantics are studied.-M. Minor, Westmar College