Selected Poems

John Clare produced some of English poetry’s most poignant and glorious lyrics. Writing not as an observer of nature but from an intimate knowledge of the wheatfields, hedgerows, and ditches of his village in Northamptonshire, he described animals, insects, trees, rivers, sunlight, and clouds with sublime sensitivity. But as enclosures and “improvements” came in the early nineteenth century, dismembering the rural landscape, his later poems became infused with a sense of disorientation and loss, and scattered with threads of madness. Clare’s genius has been rediscovered by fellow poets in every generation since his death, from Dylan Thomas to Ted Hughes to Seamus Heaney.