[In the following essay, Strickland argues that Clare was “poetically more conservative” than his Romantic peers, noting the “absence of conventional trappings of the naturalistic sublime” in his poetry.]

As pitiful as the representation of John Clare in major anthologies is, the image of the poet has been further distorted by their emphasis on his mad-poems, the most fascinating, but neither the best nor most representative, of his works. Eric Robinson's and David Powell's recent Later Poems of John Clare¹ is invaluable not only for its scholarly presentation of previously unpublished poems but for its clarification of the context of the visionary works. The edition established, against the sentimentalism of many critical observations, that Clare suffered a serious decline in poetic power with the onset of madness, particularly after the mid-1840s. It also makes clear the anomalous nature of the famous visionary lyrics, which appear in a radically different light grouped together on a few pages of an anthology rather than surrounded by eleven hundred pages of Clare's late verse, much of which continues in the retrospective vein of his earlier work and much of which is (or, in the case of songs without accompanying melodies, appears to be) doggerel.

Though still most often identified with his mad-poems, Clare is poetically more conservative than any of the more famous Romantic poets. For example, his interest in the ballad tradition goes back to his earliest childhood in Northamptonshire, and in his “Autobiography” he mentions trying to pass off his own early efforts in that form as the compositions of others.² In the 1830s his interest in ballad-collecting grew more serious, and in the asylum the ballad became his preferred form. Furthermore, the nature poetry that was his chief claim to fame in his own time is closer to the eighteenth-century tradition of the picturesque, as Timothy Brownlow has demonstrated,³ than to the meditative-landscape verse of Wordsworth and Clare's contemporaries in the second generation of Romantics.

Even within those time-honored traditions Clare is something of a psychological conservative, not to say reactionary. With regard to the ballad, although Clare mentions having been raised in their atmosphere of the preternatural,⁴ his own attempts at ballad-writing characteristically shy away from the uncanny and concentrate on the affecting or pathetic. We have numerous songs of parting/reuniting lovers, sailors off to sea, etc., but none of the demon-lovers, elfin queens and messengers returned from the dead that provide so much of the psychological appeal of the tradition. That Clare was familiar with the preternatural strain in the ballad tradition is clear from George Deacon's John Clare and the Folk Tradition, which even includes variants of the demon-lover and dead-lover-returned motifs collected by Clare, the former revealingly entitled “Taken from my Mothers singing.” The same book also includes a minor narrative poem dealing with spooks, “The Dumb Cake,” based on local legend and more superstitious than horrific.⁵ In none of Clare's own ballads before his confinement do we find a serious preternatural theme.

In the loco-descriptive tradition, similarly, as original as Clare is in terms of aesthetics (using the word etymologically with reference to his visual perception/perspective or literal “point of view”), he demonstrates a certain timidity in both choice and treatment of subject matter. By comparison with the works of his early idol, Thomson, or almost any of his poetic forebears, in Clare the naturalistic as well as preternatural sublime is conspicuous by its virtual absence—until we confront those few late visionary poems. It is because those poems answer a need that is ignored or repressed elsewhere in Clare that we devote to them an attention that is disproportionate to their importance in the Clare corpus and perhaps their intrinsic poetic merit.

1

The absence of conventional trappings of the naturalistic sublime in Clare's poetry struck his contemporary reviewers and was attributed by some to the poet's surroundings. Clare, after all, was the most purely empirical of the Romantic poets, perhaps of all poets in the language, censuring Wordsworth for “affected fooleries” and the city-boy Keats for seeking “behind every rose bush … a Venus & under every laurel a thrumming Appollo.”⁶ Clare's nature—at least when he is at his best—is neither an abstraction nor a pretext for meditation or mythology; it is visible, palpable, and one cannot imagine Clare, a day-laborer in the fields, clutching at walls like the youthful idealist Wordsworth to assure himself of their existence.

The Clare country has neither mountains nor oceans. Thus those two Burkean standbys do not appear in his work—until the asylum, when madness sporadically overwhelms empiricism. As an anonymous reviewer of The Village Minstrel wrote in October 1821, “The rushes, the sedges, the ‘willow groves,’ and the sluggish rivulets of a marshy part of Northamptonshire, are to him what the forest, the mountain, the lake, and the ocean, are to other poets.” He expressed the hope that Clare, leaving his “flat, unpicturesque and swampy fields” for “landscapes of a more sublime and beautiful order … will turn his vivid descriptive talent to paint them.” In an article that appeared six weeks later, possibly as an answer, Clare's publisher John Taylor also confessed that he found the area dull but capable of transformation in Clare's verse: “Imagination has, in my opinion, done wonders here.” He noted that forests did in fact exist in the area, as well as a fragment of a Roman wall, which he describes with almost comical predictability as “leaving the mind in that degree of obscurity, with respect to its age or use, which Burke esteems to be essentially connected with the sublime.”⁷

The biographical evidence indicates, strange as it may seem to us today, that Clare never saw either a mountain or the sea. But what is equally strange is how little use he made of the alleged sublimity of Northamptonshire ruins and forests. The early sonnet “Crowland Abbey” is a solitary exercise in the morbid antiquarian sublime and from its opening lines has a hand-me-down feel (“In sooth, it seems right awful and sublime / To gaze by moonlight on the shattered pile / Of this old abbey”) that is confirmed by the proto-Pavlovian fear and trembling that ensue.⁸ Clare's forests, in turn, are more picturesque than sublime and, even in the Northamptonshire Asylum poem “The Wind & Trees” when he compares trees in a storm to turbulent waves, the effect is less of terror than merry vivacity (LP, 364).

It is not merely that Clare did not inherit especially sublime surroundings. It is rather a question of his deliberate evasion of the sublime and its attendant emotions, of which terror is the chief, in landscape as in balladry. The roots of this evasion are psychological rather than geographical. In his autobiographical sketches written for Taylor in 1820-21 Clare refers to his “very timid disposition” as manifest in a fear of the dark and things of darkness during his crepuscular walks “for a bag of flower to Maxey, a village distant about 2 Miles”:

the traditional Registers of the Village was uncommonly superstitious (Gossips and Granneys) and I have had two or three haunted Spots to pass for it was impossible to go half a mile any were about the Lordship were there had nothing been said to be seen by these old women or some one else in their younger days. therefore I must in such extremitys seize the best remedy to keep such things out of my head as well as I coud, so on these journeys I muttered over tales of my own fancy and contriving into rhymes as well as my abilities was able; they was always romantic wanderings of Sailors, Sol[d]iers etc following them step by step from their starting out to their return, for I always lovd to see a tale end happy and as I had only my self to please I always contrived that my taste shoud be suited in such matters Sometimes I was tracking my own adventures as I wished they might be going on from the plough and flail to the easy arm chair of old age reciting armours intrigues of meeting always good fortune and marrying Ladies etc Hope was now budding and its summer skye warmd me with thrilling extacy and tho however romantic my story might be I had always cautions, fearful enough no doubt, to keep ghosts and hobgoblings out of the question what I did was to erase them and not bring them to remembrance, tho twas impossible, for as I passd those awful places, tho I dare not look boldly up, my eye was warily on the watch, glegging under my hat at every stir of a leaf or murmur of the wind and a quaking thistle was able to make me swoon with terror.

(AW, 8)

Clare turned his youthful imagination, all too susceptible as it was to the sublime, against itself, banishing the ghosts it had created with other shadowy creations of soldiers and sailors whose “romantic wanderings” at once mirrored his own struggle against the darkness and helped him escape it. The regularity of his rhymes, like the happy endings of his fantasies, was a reassurance of order in the chaotic gigantism of the night with its epiphanic terrors of leaf and thistle.⁹ The same pattern is reflected in Clare's odd avoidance of the preternatural in his ballads, even in the asylum for the most part, where the sailor returns as one of Clare's favorite personages or personae.¹⁰ One of the several prize-fighters whose identity Clare adopted in his madness (along with those of Shakespeare, Byron, Nelson, Queen Victoria's father et al.) was named, interestingly, Jones the Sailor Boy.

In “The Fate of Genius” the authorial surrogate laughs at local ghost-stories.¹¹ Elsewhere, however, Clare affirms “tho I always felt in company a disbelief in ghost witches etc yet when I was a lone in the night my fancys created thousands and my fears was always on the look out every now and then turning around to see if aught was behind me.” He goes on to relate several more instances of his “night fears.”¹² Apart from the atmosphere of peasant superstition in which he was raised, Clare had a more traumatic confrontation with the world of the dead, which left a permanent scar, not to say an open wound:

… my indisposition, (for I cannot call it illness) origionated in fainting fits, the cause of which I always imagined came from seeing when I was younger a man name Thomas Drake after he had fell off a load of hay and broke his neck the gastly palness of death struck such a terror on me that I coud not forget it for years and my dreams was constantly wanderings in church yards, digging graves, seeing spirits in charnel houses etc in my fits I swooned away without a struggle and felt nothing more then if I’d been in a dreamless sleep after I came to my self but I was always warnd of their coming by a chillness and dithering that seemd to creep from ones toe ends till it got up to ones head, when I turnd sensless and fell; sparks as if fire often flashd from my eyes or seemd to do so when I dropt, which I layd to the fall—these fits was stopped by a Mr. Arnold M.D. … tho every spring and autum since the accident happend my fears are agitated to an extreem degree and the dread of death involves me in a stupor of chilling indisposition as usual, tho I have had but one or two swoonings since they first left me.

(AW, 16)

Clare was a victim of a sensitivity that was aggravated by his up-bringing and his witnessing an accident which left him a prey to fears of death and the living dead. That these were not merely childhood fears is clear from AW, 146, where Clare, writing of his third London visit in 1824, confesses

When I used to go any were by my self. … I used to sit at night till very late because I was loath to start … for fear of meeting with supernatural [apparitions] even in the busy paths of London … my head was as full of the terribles as a gossips—thin death like shadows and goblings with sorcer eyes were continually shaping in the darkness from my haunted imagination and when I saw any one of a spare figure in the dark passing or going on by my side my blood has curdled cold at the foolish apprehension of his being a supernatural agent whose errand might be to carry me away at the first dark alley we came too. … I coud not bear to go down the dark narrow street of Chancery lane I[t] was as bad as a haunted spot to pass. … I coud not get it out of my head but that I shoud be sure to meet death or the devil.

Clare attributes this “foolish night feeling to a circumstance in my youth when I was most terribly frightened,” which may or may not refer to the death of Thomas Drake. In any case, rather than exploring this realm, converting (waking) anxiety-dreams into poetry like Coleridge, Clare seems to have tried to avoid it. When death appears in his work it is most often in sentimental guise, as in “Graves of Infants.” His later stubborn denial of his childhood sweetheart Mary Joyce's death is less an isolated eccentricity than an emblem of a larger pattern of psychological resistance and self-defense.

Clare's abnegation of the sublime is clear by comparison with James Thomson, whose Seasons were a revelation to Clare at the age of thirteen, when he went through pains to acquire the volume (AW, 9-10). Inspired by that poet's graphic powers, as later by those of Cowper et al., Clare went on to surpass him, and possibly everyone else, in the extent and precision of his descriptive detail. In his own rewriting of The Seasons, The Shepherd's Calendar, he provided “the truest poem of English country life ever written.”¹³

Perhaps the best-known sections of Thomson's Seasons, as of Vivaldi's, are his set-piece storms, particularly that in “Winter” with its depiction of humanity thrown at the non-existent mercy of the elements. In his second volume, The Village Minstrel and Other Poems (1821), Clare delineated his own “Snow Storm,” but the poem is striking for its lack of fidelity to the title. As opposed to Thomson's (or Turner's) terrible energy, all here is static: “a white world all calm,” the frost providing “a vast romance displayed / And fairy halls descending from the sky.”¹⁴ Instead of an elemental nightmare, we are offered a crystalline idyll, instead of the sublime the picturesque.

Clare's first volume, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), contains “To a Winter Scene.” As in “Crowland Abbey,” the sense of uninspired imitation of inherited sensibility is obtrusive from its opening apostrophe, “Hail scenes of Desolation and despair.” For the most part the style is more characteristic of, say, Collins than Clare, and the poet is least cogent when most declamatory (“Your fate is pleasing to this heart of mine / Your wildest horrors I the most esteem”—JC, 11). Clare's “most splendid storm,” as Timothy Brownlow notes,¹⁵ is contained in lines 73-135 of “November” in The Shepherd's Calendar, beginning thus:

Dull for a time the slumbering weather flings
Its murky prison round then winds wake loud
Wi sudden start the once still forest sings
Winters returning song cloud races cloud
And the orison throws away its shrowd
And sweeps its stretching circle from the eye
Storm upon storm in quick succession crowd
And oer the sameness of the purple skye
Heaven paints its wild irregularity[.]

(SC, 119)

The opening is as close as the pre-asylum Clare comes to the naturalistic sublime; yet Brownlow is correct in discussing the work under the rubric of the picturesque, into the characteristic “irregularity” of which the stanza modulates by its conclusion. In the ensuing stanzas the poet turns away from the energies of the sublime to the milder captivation of the picturesque—and a picturesque of a peculiarly Clarean homeliness:

The shepherd oft foretells by simple ways
The weathers change that will ere long prevail
He marks the dull ass that grows wild and brays
And sees the old cows gad adown the vale
A summer race and snuff the coming gale
The old dame sees her cat wi fears alarm
Play hurly burly races wi its tale
And while she stops her wheel her hands to warm
She rubs her shooting corns and prophecys a storm[.]

After two more stanzas of turkeys, hogs and horses, the storm finally begins in earnest—and ends as quickly:

And quick it comes among the forest oaks
Wi sobbing ebbs and uproar gathering high
The scard hoarse raven on its cradle croaks
And stock dove flocks in startld terrors flye
While the blue hawk hangs oer them in the skye
The shepherd happy when the day is done
Hastes to his evening fire his cloaths to dry
And forrester crouchd down the storm to shun
Scarce hears amid the strife the poachers muttering gun
The ploughman hears the sudden storm begin
And hies for shelter from his naked toil
Buttoning his doublet closer to his chin
He speeds him hasty oer the elting soil
While clouds above him in wild fury boil
And winds drive heavily the beating rain
He turns his back to catch his breath awhile
Then ekes his speed and faces it again
To seek the shepherds hut beside the rushy plain[.]

Clare's primary interest, unlike Thomson's, is not in the sublime energy of the tempest, which overwhelms hapless humanity as its description is meant to overwhelm the reader's consciousness, but in the familiar animal and human energies it activates. As for the storm itself, its brevity is as intriguing a feature of its description as any of the visual details. Other “storm” poems of Clare's repeat the same pattern of truncated description of the tempest followed immediately by flight for shelter. This is true of the “pale traveller” in “Winter,” “who croodling hastens from the storm behind / Fast gathering deep and black—again to find / His cottage fire and corners sheltering bounds” (JC, 96). And of the shepherd who similarly “hastes to sheltering bowers” at the sound of the “brustling” of an aspen (JC, 128). And of the fisherman in “Storm in the Fens,” who flees home to build a fire “And read a book of songs about the sea” (JC, 265). In a sonnet from The Village Minstrel also entitled “November” Clare describes

… uproarious madness—when the start
Of sudden tempest stirs the forrest leaves
Into hoarse madness till the shower set free
Stills the hugh Wells and ebbs the mighty heaves
That swing the forrest like a troubled sea
I love the wizard noise and rave in turn
Half vacant thought and self imagined rhymes
Then hide me from the shower a short sojourn
Neath ivied oak and mutter to the winds
Wishing their melody belonged to me
That I might breath a living song to thee[.]

This is Clare's version of the just-published “Ode to the West Wind.” Characteristically, however, the peasant Clare is less vulnerable to symbolism than Shelley, only temporarily indulging himself in the poet-as-wind conceit. While Shelley concludes with “Be thou me, impetuous one!” Clare is content to “rave in turn. … Then hide me,” never quite surrendering himself to sublimity (or stridency). The pattern of flight repeats itself, here in the first person as in the later abbreviated storm of “A Rhapsody” (LP, 992). Of course, one might comment simply that Clare knew enough to come in out of the rain. But whether disguised as peasant surrogate or “I,” he is also running for cover less literally.

2

The sublime is more recognizable than definable, but Martin Price provides the best description in pointing to the polyvalence of the term:

It could be applied to the natural landscape, to a state of mind, to a literary mode; it could evoke orthodox religious experience or pantheistic rapture, Gothic terror or Doric severity, the grandeur of Michelangelo's sculptures or the factitious pleasures of mediaevalized romance. The sublime found a new meaning, one is tempted to say, every time a critic framed a new contrast between the shapely and the tremendous, between the formally satisfying object and the overwhelming impression. … The sublime was an experience of transcendence, a surpassing of convention or reasonable limits, an attempt to come to terms with the unimaginable. … Such moments were fascinating to an age that had lost many of the forms of traditional piety and had diffused the religious experience—the sense of the numinous—over the natural world and over the processes of feeling as well.¹⁶

More recently, Thomas McFarland has taken up the latter point in his discussion of the concept of “imagination” as the secular substitute for the vanished “soul.” His thesis is that “imagination became so important because soul had been so important and could no longer carry its burden of significance. That significance was an assurance that there was meaning in life. No soul, no meaning. But even if soul wilted under the onslaught of science and skepticism, so long as there was imagination as secondary validator then at least there remained the possibility of meaning.” On the same point McFarland later suggests that to the largely interchangeable terms imagination, invention or originality, and genius “at least one more can be added: ‘sublimity’ or the sublime,” for “they are all equivalent in import though not in designation. In most instances they are summoned at some emotional apex where the substitution of another would serve to sustain the meaning of the passage.”¹⁷

Samuel Holt Monk regards the cult of the sublime “not … as a revolutionary movement outside of and against neo-classical standards of taste … but rather as the other … pole on which the world of eighteenth-century art turned.”¹⁸ The sublime coexisted in a complementary, not to say compensatory, relationship to neo-classical ideals, like the emotional self-indulgence of the Sturm und Drang or emfindsamer Stil in music, an eighteenth-century instance of the return of the repressed.

But what precisely was being repressed, apart from the “tremendous” and “overwhelming” of which Price writes? Speaking specifically, or metonymously, of the sublime in verbal art, Neil Hertz seems to suggest that it is the psychological vulnerability of the reader. Framing his argument in Freudian terms, he finds the authority, perhaps the autonomy, of the reader threatened by that of the writer who usurps his consciousness by the superior force of his vision or style.¹⁹ Thomas Weiskel argues similarly: “Discourse in the Peri Hypsous … is a power struggle. Visual imagery, for example, is recommended for the ‘enthrallment’ (ekpleksis) of the poor reader … who is scorched, pierced, inundated, blown down, and generally knocked about by the sublime, if Longinus is any guide.” Weiskel distinguishes between the “negative” and “egotistical” sublime, finding Freudian analogues, respectively, in superego anxiety and narcissism. He goes on to relate the terror of the sublime to castration-anxiety—sublime power as power to hurt, a threat evaded by identification with or introjection of its irresistible authority (cf. Freud on the resolution of the Oedipus complex)—and the Burkean sense of catharsis to evacuation and anal-sadistic aggression.²⁰

The recourse to psychoanalysis is required by the diction of the sublime cultists, which is consistently erotic or crypto-erotic: the sublime is time and time again depicted in terms of excitation, penetration/rape and orgasm. Thomson refers to “All that enlarges and transports the soul.” In the Alps John Dennis describes “transporting Pleasures … unusual Transports” and “a delightful Horror, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled.” In The Sacred Theory of Earth Thomas Burnet speaks of being “rapt” and “ravished” by the vast, grand and majestic in nature. Continuing the analogy, Edward Young depicts the victim—no other word will do—of the sublime as a sort of Sabine woman in Night Thoughts: “True, all things speak a God; but in the small, / Men trace out him; in great, he seizes Man; / Seizes, and elevates, and raps, and fills.”²¹

For Thomas Reid the sublime is as “irresistible” as amor al cor gentil, “like fire thrown into the midst of combustible matter.” For John Baillie “The Sublime dilates and elevates the soul, Fear sinks and contracts it,” and for Alexander Gerard it “occupies the whole soul, and suspends its motions.”²² This enforced metaphysical intimacy is described by John Brown as a capacity to “exalt [the soul] to the highest Pitch of Elevation that our mortal Condition will admit.” Jean Le Clerc alludes to the sublime style “that transports, that ravishes, that governs and turns our Souls about as it pleases.” Even for the quietist Fénelon the sublime is said to “move and seize their Passions” and “overwhelms People's Minds with its Vehemence: it renders them speechless: it melts them into Tears.” In The Adventurer the sublime “whirls away the auditor like a mighty torrent, and pierces the inmost recesses of his heart like a flash of lightning.” For Dennis, parodied by Pope as “Sir Tremendous Longinus,” the “noble Vigour” or “invincible Force” of the sublime, again, “commits a pleasing Rape upon the very Soul of the Reader … like the Artillery of Jove, it thunders, blazes, and strikes at once, and shews all the united Force of a Writer.” “The Sublime ravishes” (Anonymous), “elevates the soul” (Dennis), “transports, astonishes” (John Lawson), is seen to “transport and carry away the Reader” (The Plain Dealer). It offers “transport” (Samuel Werenfels), “transport or extasy” (John Ward), “Raptures” (Balthasar Gracian y Morales).²³ It “throws the soul into a divine transport of admiration and amazement, which occupies and fills the mind” (William Duff).²⁴ Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume to Kant (“a momentary check to the vital forces, followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful”) contribute to the erotic sub-text of sublime theory.²⁵

The sublime moment is an aesthetic analogue to coitus, and of similar intensity and potential violence, a psycho-sexual assault on subject by object. James Beattie invented the fanciful etymology of the term in super limas, “above the mud or slime of this world.” But opposites meet, as we find in the hilarious, touching or revolting (your choice) image of one cultist of the sublime, a Mrs. Murray, lying in the mud beneath a Scottish waterfall in what Monk refers to as an “emotional orgy.”²⁶ This, as Henry James said of the apparition in The Scarlet Letter of the giant “A” in the sky, “goes too far and is in danger of crossing the line that separates the sublime from its intimate neighbour.”²⁷

But the sublime moment has a paradoxical allure, illuminated more by late than early Freud, specifically his description of Thanatos at instinctual war with Eros, as ancient a conceit in its evocation of Prudentius as the theory is revolutionary. The death-wish is evident on the most superficial level in the sublime cult of graveyards, ruins and all sorts of disasters. “There is no Spectacle we so eagerly pursue,” writes Burke in On the Sublime (I, xiv, 41), “as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.” This curiously recalls La Rochefoucauld on the misfortunes of others, and one cannot help but regard the at times ghoulish fixations of the Graveyard School as an imperfect foreshadowing of current tabloids. Are the volcanoes, plagues and snow-storms of Thomson the forebears not only of the catastrophes relished by Turner and Martin but the disaster movies that periodically satisfy the contemporary hunger for the sublime? Is Night Thoughts the Creepshow of the 1740s?

It is not only our animal lust for the destruction of others that is seduced by the sublime and its socially legitimizing rhetoric but also, somewhat more subtly, our more specifically human lust for the destruction of oneself. Concurrent with crypto-erotic imagery, much of which smells of death, theories of the sublime abound in descriptions of the “extinction,” “annihilation” and “astonishment” of the soul. The emblem of the sublime as flirtation with death is the English tourist in the Alps (Dennis or Gray or whoever) gazing and gasping over the brink of destruction. The sublime offers sexual excitation concurrently with momentary gratification of the death-wish in the extinction of (normal) consciousness. It is unique in the simultaneity of its vicarious satisfaction of both Eros and Thanatos.²⁸

In 1972 Theodore E. B. Wood offered a lexicon of uses of the term sublime from 1650 to 1760, spanning the heyday of the cult. An interesting follow-up might be a study of the rapid deterioration of the word in the years that followed. While elements of the sublime attained even greater notoriety through the enormous popularity of the Gothic novels, particularly Radcliffe's, and were variously transformed by the great Romantics, as in Blake's apocalyptic rewriting of Ossian, the term itself decayed into meaninglessness. As things developed, “sublime” came to suffer the same fate as “nice,” “terrific,” “tremendous” and other one-time adjectives faded to non-words: from nice distinction to nice guy, the human heart's “gates / Terrific” to terrific shoes. … The quiche was tremendous and the mousse was simply sublime. To what extent the dictional bathos is merely decadent, to what extent apotropaic—a semiconscious domestication of threatening material—is subject to speculation.

Yet it is evident that by the Regency the term sublime had lost most of what little (or excessive) meaning it had. The degree to which it has become a stock phrase if not response is clearly reflected in the letters written to Clare by his patron and later editor, the poetaster Eliza Emmerson. Each time she uses or abuses the word, almost by reflex an exclamation point rears its head: Clare excels “in the simple scenes of pastoral nature, the pathetically descriptive, and the sublime!”; his poems are “at once, simply beautiful—affecting—and occasionally sublime! … in the Devout, and sublime! you create astonishment”; “Your ‘Thunder Storm’ truly natural, and sublime!”; “the terrible and sublime!” (CH, 11, 66, 128, 188). Mrs. Emmerson was not the only soul afflicted by punctuational frenzy, to judge by Parson Adams' reaction to Iliad XIII and XIV in Joseph Andrews (III, 2) or the Morning Chronicle report (9 March 1794) of the debut of Haydn's “Military” Symphony and its “climax of horrid sublimity! which, if others can conceive, he alone can execute.”²⁹

But Clare was himself less susceptible to this sort of cant and kneejerk ecstasy. In his Journal he applies the term sublime only to the imagery of the Scriptures and Paradise Lost, apart from a satiric reference to a young poet's “very pathetic and sublime wish … that the tears he leaves on his [schoolmaster's] grave may grow up a marble monument to his memory.”³⁰ Nonetheless, Clare was not beyond tossing in the cliché to “Crowland Abbey” and rhymae causa to “The Progress of Ryhme”: “All I beheld of grand—with time / Grew up to beautifuls sublime” (JC, 157), a couplet which involves as much confusion of aesthetic categories as absence of meaning. His address to “Autumn” describes the “wile sorceress” as “sublime in grief” at the approach of winter (JC, 163-64). Leaves—not in turbulent array but in their simple being—are described as sublime in “The Eternity of Nature,” and this usage, if more unusual, is more common in Clare. The closest the poet comes to theorizing about the sublime is in a single couplet in “Shadows of Taste” (“Thus truth to nature as the true sublime / Stands a mount atlas overpeering time,” JC, 172) and a stanza in the early Northborough poem “The Flitting”:

Some sing the pomps of chivalry
As legends of the ancient time
Where gold and pearls and my[s]tery
Are shadows painted for sublime
But passions of sublimity
Belong to plain and simpler things
And David underneath a tree
Sought when a shepherd Salems spring.

(JC, 252)

It is in this unique sense that Clare continues to use the word sublime in the asylum years: “Aye nothing seems so happy & sublime / As sabbath bells & their delightful chime”; “that clod brown bird sublime”; “The seasons each as God bestows / Are simple and sublime” (LP, 66, 443, 496). A somewhat more traditional usage is Clare's reference to “The wild sublimity of windy days” (LP, 178), though this scene too proves the antithesis of sublime obscurity. In general, Clare's equation of the simple and normal—the commonplace in fact—with the sublime runs counter to the whole tradition. One would be tempted to call the eccentricity a subversion of that tradition were it not that Clare is by the Nineteenth Century using a non-word of vaguely approbatory tone. Yet if there is a continuity in Clare's poetic use of the term in the asylum years, sublime content appears in his verse in new and unexpected ways.

3

The sublime is linked, through the desire it answers and the energies it evokes, to the subliminal. Adapting Kant's argument that the sublime is located in the ideas of reason not the things of nature, which have an essentially catalytic rather than creative function, we might argue that the externally vast, obscure and horrific is a revelation, though oblique, of those qualities within us. It was his euhemeristic recognition that all sublimities reside in the human breast that permitted Blake to internalize the sublime not as a spectacle of Ossianic demigods but a psychomachia of visionary forms.

Clare, despite quick comparisons, is eminently non-Blakean. Consecrated to precise recreation of the dust of this world, he seems constitutionally incapable of using nature symbolically; his minimal political awareness is clear in his enlisting twice in the militia for the bounty;³¹ and while Blake gave full rein to his apocalyptic imagination, Clare tried to stifle his.

Tried. In spite of the otherworldliness of several of his recorded dreams, his usual poetic description of the dream-world, in such poems as “The Enthusiast A Daydream in Summer,” is again more picturesque than sublime. Before the asylum years only one poem approaches the horrific sublime, “The Night Mare or Superstitions Dream,” of which Clare warns Taylor on December 18, 1821 “youl only laugh at its bombast when I send it but my vanity must have its way—The Night Mare is a thing Ive been very much subject too & the thing describ’d is the last judgment nearly as my horrors conscieved it when this witchcraft of the soul was on me.”³² However based on the poet's own nightmares, the poem is inconceivable without the publication five years earlier of Byron's “Darkness,” for both poems share an overriding sense of personal guilt displaced in dies irae. The sources of Clare's guilt included his sloth, alcoholism and womanizing.

He was incapable of holding a job. As early as 1825 he was treated for alcoholic depression, and Frederick Martin—albeit no model of objectivity—attributed his madness to the aggravation of the same condition.³³ Clare “loves ale—likes the girls—somewhat idle—hates work,” Taylor's cousin Edward Drury wrote more accurately than charitably to him in April 1819 (CH, 3). During his third visit to London in 1824 Clare haunted the theatrical demi-monde, notorious for its loose sexual morals,³⁴ and in the mid-1820s his correspondence with Mrs. Emmerson indicates a more serious extramarital affair.³⁵ His invitation poems are full of references—most, one assumes, merely flirtatious when not purely fictitious—to countless girls, and the sense of extreme sexual frustration in confinement pervades the later poems. More importantly, from the 1830s on, Clare lived with the obsessive delusion that he had committed bigamy with Mary Joyce and his wife and in both verse and letters writes of his confinement as a punishment for this infidelity.

Clare may have been in part following his poetic talents or material on hand in restricting himself to a more picturesque than sublime art. But beyond that, the relative absence of the sublime in his work may be attributed to the devastating effect on the poet of his subconscious, especially in two areas, sex and death, inextricably bound in the sublime moment. Clare rarely had either the strength of imagination or psychological inclination towards even an oblique poetic self-exploration of sexual and other guilt or of the childhood trauma which literally gave him fits. For the most part he clung defensively to the persona of the innocent poet of the fields—his alter ego Lubin in The Village Minstrel is far more ethereal, unsociable and asexual than his creator—and against the fear of death clung to a dream of an eternal nature and a delusion of an undying love. That Mary Joyce was dead to him since their teens, and literally deceased since 1838, had no effect on his idée fixe of an innocent matrimony on some rarefied plane, nor on his continuing to write letters to her as well as his wife Patty and their children.

Clare's avoidance of the occasions of the sublime is a defensive refusal to succumb to a potentially catastrophic vulnerability. In the asylum years we see the polarization of the poet's creativity: the few brief flashes of vision surrounded by progressively more vapid and innocuous balladry and nature poetry which cannot bear comparison with his earlier work—and which was written, one senses, to “kill time” in both the common and Baudelairean sense, distracting the poet from his bizarre obsessions. Its content is often so bland as to suggest a deliberately restricted imaginative diet. As in the errands of his youth, we once again find the poet versifying to defend himself against things of darkness, to exorcise rather than embody them with rhyme.

Clare's fear of the subconscious is understandable solely in biographical terms. The very extent to which his most sophisticated critics take his honest-ploughboy persona at face value, accepting Clare as a dreamy but essentially healthy peasant who somehow ended up in the madhouse for a quarter-century, is perhaps the best argument for Clare as master of disguise. “Before Clare was a mad poet, he was a sane poet,” note defenders of the early verse against those who argue for the greater interest of the latter.³⁶ But how sane? He was unable to function as a worker due to his lazy dreaminess. His quasi-epileptic attacks, etc. were clearly psychosomatic, and the intensity of his “foolish night feeling” was extreme. The suspiciousness of his nature from an early age foreshadows his later paranoia, and the despair of his confinement is adumbrated well in advance of mid-life in Clare's depression. His passion for alcohol and women, while hardly enough to merit him a padded cell, does little to indicate that psychological equilibrium was his strong suit. Without trying to deny Clare his poetic license, I think it is fair to say that the jolly-ploughboy persona was precisely that—etymologically, a mask—and that in choosing his famous bright green jacket for his first trip to London Clare was not so much demonstrating peasant taste as dressing a part.

If a reflection of class patronage, the critical distortion of Clare into ingenuous bard is at root benevolent. Maybe we do not need another damaged archangel (although I find Clare more psychologically akin to Coleridge—to whom he is almost never compared—than to the other Romantics).³⁷ More annoying are the platitudes and facile paradoxes about his confinement: “The Rural Muse and his long insanity were, in my opinion, about the two best friends under a merciful Heaven by which John Clare was ever visited”; “Real independence of mind soared in the asylum, in the prison where he found freedom, where he was able to leave the concerns of the world behind altogether.”³⁸

Some friend. Some freedom.

Clare's life is a pretty grim prospect, even with critical Claude-glass in hand. But apart from purely biographical concerns, the defensive superficiality of much of Clare's work is motivated by evasion not merely of guilt but of the poet's visionary orientation, which one does not know whether to call apocalyptic or hysterical. It almost seems as if whenever Clare opens himself up to (reveal) the sublime, the end of the world is nigh. At the heart of the few visionary poems of the asylum years there is a sense of absolute frustration and implacable rage that is unique in my experience. Unlike Blake, who envisions mankind united in Jesus in Eternity, Clare wants most of all, I believe, to destroy mankind and world with it so that he may attain his “real independence” and “freedom.” It is the abiding and at times hideous intensity of the erstwhile-jolly ploughboy's wrath that Clare tries to evade in silence or sing-song, and the violent outbursts which were probably the efficient cause of his confinement in “the land of Sodom,” the “Bastile of hell” are echoed with varying degrees of subtlety in the mad-poems.

In the two sublime set-pieces of “Childe Harold” thunderstorms are both prefigurative of the last day and prerequisite to Clare's liberation (“Roll on ye wrath of thunders—peal on peal / Till worlds are ruins and myself alone”; “His thunderbolts leave life but as the clod / Cold & inna[ni]mate—their temples fall / … & here I comfort seek & early joys renew,” LP, 48, 69-70). Even in the relatively mild-mannered “I Am” “I long for scenes, where man hath never trod / A place where women never smiled or wept” (LP, 397). In “A Vision” his declamation of independence is scrawled over a banished earth: “I snatch’d the sun's eternal ray,—/ And wrote ‘till earth was but a name” (LP, 297). More blatantly apocalyptic are “An invite to Eternity” and “Song Last Day.” In the first, the greatest of Clare's visionary lyrics, his invitation to the unnamed maiden is to a wedding that will be celebrated only “When there’s nor life nor light to see / … Where life will fade like visioned dreams” and both space and time have been abolished (“the sky / Above, below, around us … / And past, and present all as one,” LP, 348-49). In the “Song” Clare exults in a cosmic vindictiveness:

When sun & moon are past away
& mingle with the blast …
When towns & cities temples graves
All vanish like a breeze …
When stars & skys shall all decay
& earth no more shall be
When heaven itself shall pass away
Then thou’lt remember me

(LP, 175-76)

The sense of Clare as Antichrist is here further evoked by the parody of “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” It is in this poem and a “Fragment” that the familiar elements of the sublime most abound. In “Song Last Day” “sun and moon,” “roaring waves and wind,” “mountains,” “temples graves,” “thunders sulphurous,” “deadly thunder cloud,” etc. all appear only to be annihilated. Unlike his predecessors in the sublime tradition, Clare is not so much victimized by the destructive elements of the sublime as incarnate within them, not “astonished” or “struck dumb” by the sublime but voicing his Lear-like wrath in it. The condemned man in his “prison” has become the judge of the dies irae. And this temporary escape might be the closest Clare came to “real independence of mind” in the asylum.

Clare rarely found the courage and/or desperation to write in this dark prophetic vein, and even less frequently the strength of imagination to make coherent art of it. Like the nightmare landscapes themselves, the poetry is devoid of light if full of heat. “Fragment” is the last of Clare's visionary poems, but the vision is characteristically obscure and indistinct.

The cataract whirling to the precipiece
Elbows down rocks and shoulders thundering through
Roars, howls and stifled murmurs never cease
Hell and its agonies seems hid below
Thick rolls the mist that smokes and falls in dew
The trees and greensward wear the deepest green
Horrible mysteries in the gulf stares through
Darkness and foam are indistinctly seen
Roars of a million tongues and none knows what they mean

(LP, 766)

Oddly enough, what was to prove Clare's final effort in the sublime vein looks back to the beginnings of the tradition in Thomson's “Winter,”³⁹ but the imagery reflects that peculiarly swift modulation from the sublime to the eschatological that is symptomatic of the imaginative extremism of which Clare himself was normally so wary. We are no sooner shown a precipice than Hell itself, no sooner mist than horrible mysteries, unnamed and indistinct as the darkness or foam. Perhaps necessarily indistinct. Clare, the poet of minutiae, who observed with painstaking and at times almost painful accuracy, is here presenting no observed scene—at least no scene observed “out there.” He never visited such a landscape in his life. But I doubt as well whether literary antecedents explain—though they may provide—these images, for if Clare never saw a precipice outside of galleries or his reading, he more than most of us had his glimpses of the abyss; if he never saw such a cataract and liquid smoke, his madness forced upon him a private viewing of analogous mysteries. Their furious cogency is suggested in the cacophony of the final line, which confesses to both the bewilderment of the poet and his limited success in articulating this aspect of his vision.

The poem is found on page 101 of the second volume of transcripts made in the 1840s and 1850s by W. F. Knight, house steward at Northamptonshire Lunatic Asylum, and judged by Eric Robinson as “probably broadly chronological” in arrangement (LP, xii). Overleaf we are transported from the wild and cryptic “Roars of a million tongues” to

My bonny young Mary the maid o’ the plough I feel such a something I cannot tell how

The flowers i’ the grass and the leafs on the bough And its a for young Mary the maid o’ the plough. …

Notes

1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Cited as LP with page number.

2. John Clare's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), p. 12. Cited as AW with page number.

3. John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

4. See AW, pp. 3, 8, and “January: A Cottage Evening” in The Shepherd's Calendar, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964). Cited as SC with page number.

5. (London: Sinclair Browne, 1983), pp. 135-36, 142-43 and 70-72. See too Clare's treatment of a local haunted house in “The Lodge house A Gossips Tale,” AW, 87-96.

6. Yale MS. published in A. J. V. Chapple, “Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of John Clare,” Yale University Library Gazette, 31, No. 1 (July 1956), 48. The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 223.

7. John Clare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Mark Storey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 143, 158. See also pp. 226-27, 263-64. Cited as CH with page number.

8. John Clare: Selected Poems, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Dent, 1965), pp.138-39. See too “The Churchyard,” LP, 364.

9. See AW, 60 for a similar account of the trips to Maxey.

10. See LP, 230, 327, 678, 680, 681, 708, 715, 757, 940, 954, 971, 973, 1001.

11. Pierpont Morgan Library, MA 1320.

12. AW, 37-38. See too p. 61 on Clare's “timid disposition” and fear of the dark, and p. 63 on local belief in witches.

13. SC, xiv. Mark Storey, Ian Jack and Timothy Brownlow consider the poem Clare's finest achievement, and John Barrell calls it “the best expression of his pervasive and remarkably accurate sense of place” in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972), p. 169.

14. The Oxford Authors John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 199-200. Cited as JC with page number.

15. Brownlow, p. 92.

16. “The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers,” Yale Review, 58 (1969), 194-95.

17. Originality and Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 151, 18.

18. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1960), p. iii.

19. “Lecture de Longin,” Poétique: revue de théorie et d’analyse littéraires, 15 (1973), 303.

20. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 5, 83, 93, 96.

21. Cited in Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 329, 278, 277, 215, 362. On the borderline-erotic “filling” of the soul see the remarks of John Baillie and Joseph Addison in Monk, pp. 54, 57.

22. Cited in Walter J. Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1957), pp. 153, 74.

23. Cited in Theodore E.B. Wood, The Word “Sublime” and its Context 1650-1760 (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), pp. 68, 77, 90, 94, 154, 177.

24. Cited in McFarland, p. 186.

25. Kant cited in Monk, p.6. On this side of the Atlantic cf. Thoreau: “the infinite, the sublime, seizes upon the soul and disarms it … so sure as we meet them face to face, we yield.” See The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Early Essays and Miscellanies, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser with Alexander C. Kern (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), p. 99. The 1837 essay from which the statement is drawn dilutes sublime theory (see below) to “Whatever demands our admiration or respect is, in a degree, sublime.”

26. See Monk, pp. 129, 220-21. For a different view of Burke's conception of the beautiful, not the sublime, as “closely related to the delights of sexual love,” see Jean H. Hagstrum, “Blake and British Art: The Gifts of Grace and Terror” in Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities, ed. Karl Kroeber and William Walling (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), p. 65. I find the traditional delineation of the beautiful in terms of tranquillity, order, delicacy and affection not very amenable to the disequilibrium and energy of Eros, though perhaps reconciliable with the traditional notion of Agape.

27. The Portable Henry James, rev. ed., ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 446.

28. In developing a sequential model of the sublime moment Weiskel speaks not of paradox but of a succession of conflicting psychological states. While his delineation is true to sublime theory, it is perhaps a schematic ex post facto distortion of the phenomenon itself. See esp. p. 105 for his “chronological” analysis of the experience.

29. Quoted by Christopher Hogwood, “Haydn in England,” p. 2 (liner notes accompanying Oiseau-Lyre disc 411 833-1).

30. The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 200, 182, 231.

31. See AW, 78-82 and Bob Heyes, “John Clare and the Militia,” John Clare Society Journal, 4 (1985), 48-54.

32. MS. in Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

33. See Edward Storey, A Right to Song: the Life of John Clare (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 194 and Frederick Martin, The Life of John Clare (London: Macmillan, 1865) [2nd ed., London: Frank Cass and Co., 1964]. See too Arthur Symons' reference to “ill-health, over-work and drink” as causes of Clare's madness (CH, 301) and Dr. P.R. Nesbitt, superintendent of Northampton General Lunatic Hospital and Asylum after 1845, who “always understood Clare's affliction to have had its origin in dissipation” (cited in J. W. and Anne Tibble, John Clare: His Life and Poetry [London: Macmillan, 1956], p. 197).

34. As alluded to in Clare's Don Juan A Poem. See C. V. Fletcher, “The poetry of John Clare, with particular reference to poems written between 1837 and 1864” (M. Phil. thesis, University of Nottingham, 1973), pp. 32-39, quoted in LP, 101-02. Edward Storey attributes Clare's “theater-going” to his second London visit of 1822 (p. 180).

35. See Edward Storey, pp. 195-97.

36. Quote from Ian Jack, “Poems of John Clare's Sanity” in Some British Romantics, ed. John Jordan, James Logan and Northrop Frye (Dayton: Ohio Univ. Press, 1966). The observation is adopted “as my motto” by Brownlow, p. 1.

37. Cf. Raimonda Modiano, “Coleridge and the Sublime: A Response to Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime,” Wordsworth Circle, 9 (1978), 119: “Coleridge's reasons for excluding the negative sublime were largely personal. … For Coleridge, imaginative defeat, danger, fear, or pain were much too real and powerful.” Clare's confusion of aesthetic categories, noted above, is likewise paralleled in Coleridge's defensive transformation of the beautiful into a naturalized version of the sublime. See Elinor Shaffer, “Coleridge's Revolution in the Standard of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28 (1969), 213-21.

38. Spencer T. Hall in March 1866 (CH, 275); Mark Storey, The Poetry of John Clare (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974), p. 15.

39. As Robinson and Powell suggest in their footnote, quoting lines 102-05 of the poem: “it bursts a way / Where rocks and woods o’erhang the turbid stream; / There gathering triple force, rapid and deep, / It boils, and wheels, and foams, and thunders through.”