John Clare Research Paper

Filled with striking imagery, Romantic poetry looked to the individual and nature to create pieces of imaginative and fantastical art. Romanticism started around 1798 and ended around 1850. Poets such as Byron, Shelley, and Keats wrote in ways that broke standards made by Neoclassic poetry. There was now a emphasis on feeling an emotion rather than logic and reasoning, and the frigid and stiff structure of Neoclassic poetry was rejected and the use of free verse rose. During the Romantic Movement, John Clare wrote poetry, filled with amazing images of nature and rural life, and many of his poems looked inward and discussed the individual; he is described as “the quintessential Romantic poet”(). He used strong dialect in his poetry, and rejected

The result was his first book called The Poems of Rural Life and Scenery, and it was a huge success, selling over 3,000 copies in its first year and had to be reprinted three times. After years of financial instability, Clare began to obtain a small annuity, which allowed him to marry Martha Turner, another woman who would inspire many of his poems. He was able to travel to London and found patrons there, who would stick with him through the thick and thin. In 1832, he was able to settle in a cottage, provided by one of Clare’s aristocratic admirers. However, during this time, Clare’s financial instability rose again. His expenditures either stayed with or exceeded his income, with his books not being able to be sold well and his farm being undercapitalized. Clare’s mental state began to deteriorate, complaining of writer’s block and memory loss, and often muttering incoherently. In 1837, he was brought to High Beech Asylum, a horrible place where the mentally ill were brought. Clare was able to go out into nature and write his poems, but his mental state worsened, as he began to develop multiple personalities, claiming that he was sometimes Lord Byron or Shakespeare. However, his creativity lived on, and his poems were no less imaginative and beautiful than before. He escaped from the asylum and

In the first stanza, he begins the poem with a seemingly contradictory statement, “I am— yet what I am none cares or knows” (l.1). His choice of words create a sense of loneliness and abandonment; no one cares about him or knows of him, but he still exists. He compares himself to a lost memory in “my friends forsake me like a memory lost” (l. 2) and is the “self-consumer of [his] woes” (l. 3). Again, his words create a tone of solitude and desertion; he has no one to remember him or to share his thoughts with. Continuing on, he compare his “woes” (l. 3) to “shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes”. His diction describes his feeling of pain that is agonizing to hold in, because he has no one to let it out to, and no one to love him; he is all by himself. He then creates a metaphor comparing his mind and a shipwreck. He compares himself to a “vapor” (l. 6), again, describing himself as unnoticed and invisible, “tossed/ Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,/ Into the living sea of waking dreams” (ll. 6-8); he is lost in his own mind, a “nothingness”(l. 7) and filled with “waking dreams” (l. 8). His diction in these lines create a sense of fullness, but also emptiness. His mind is filled with thoughts and dreams, but it has no meaning to him, like fluff, material with no real substance behind it. In his