I Am [Paperback]

Thou art gone the dark journey
That leaves no returning;
'Tis fruitless to mourn thee
But who can help mourning
To think of the life
That did laugh on thy brow
In the beautiful past
Left so desolate now?

This is just the first stanza of a poem whose unusual lyrical intensity is sustained throughout. Why Bate couldn't have tossed in just a few more such poems - particularly the ones he talks about in his biography - is as baffling as it is enraging. After so much neglect and misfortune, one would think that Bate might have been a bit more discerning in his choice of poems to include here. It is time for Clare's reputation to be granted its very just reward, and I am afraid that Bate may have missed his chance. (Though I see that he has chosen to participate in the debate himself here, which exemplifies the deep love that must have motivated him to spend so much time and energy on the biography. His point about ratings and discussion is an excellent one.)

Nonetheless, readers will undoubtedly be thankful for some of the unbelievable writing Bate did select for this collection, such as the riveting "The Fallen Elm" in which we find ghostly anticipations of Auden, Philip Levine and Seamus Heany. Speaking of the elm whose falling prompted one of the most moving letters to a friend Clare ever penned, Clare writes:

Thou owned a language by which hearts are stirred
Deeper than by a feeling clothed in words,
And speakest now what's known of every tongue,
Language of pity and the force of wrong.

What amazing writing. That last line smacks of Auden's best work, particularly his masterful "September 1, 1939." The broad strokes of Clare's longer work are matched in power only by his more compact and formally unprecedented sonnets. In the biography, Bates writes that "Clare challenged the conventions of poetic diction by using the vocabulary of his region; in his poems of the 1830s he challenged the conventions of form, revealing that the sonnet could be divided up in new ways." Bates goes on to note that some of the rhyme schemes Clare employed in his sonnets are without precedent, while the timing of his execution simultaneously challenges and revitalizes an overly familiar poetic form. But beyond all of this jargon and technical criticism, the sheer emotional boundlessness of so many of Clare's sonnets is what really strikes home. Bates suggests that Clare is England's greatest poet of childhood. While I think such a statement undermines Blake's achievement, it is not unfair to consider Clare a very close second to Blake. Poems like Blake's "London" or "The Sick Rose" meet their match in some of Clare's more impassioned stretches of verse.

That the world has gone without fully recognizing one of its quieter geniuses is a sad fact of history now. At least someone is trying. Though Bate counts Clare's complete poems to the amount of "3500," it does not seem unreasonable to ask for a more comprehensive representation of the man's achievement. After all, Thomas Hardy's complete poems is over 900 pages long, and while the power of Hardy's work waned with age, Clare wrote some great material while languishing away in asylums as an older man. Even Hardy's amazing earlier poems -- "The Darkling Thrush" or "Neutral Tones," for instance -- fail to entirely outdo a good portion of Clare's work. The two poets are quite comparable, especially since Clare tackled precisely the same themes -- nature, mortality, lost loves, nostalgia -- and sometimes with just as much if not more majesty. I really applaud Bate's great effort on behalf of Clare, and though asking for more in the face of such hard work does little justice to my sincere gratitude, I still think some attention need be paid to the scattered nature of Clare's published writings. I think a fuller example of his work ought to be included in one book, not thrown across many different volumes. If Bate is not the man for this job, hopefully somebody else will be in my lifetime.

(Apologies for filling in a rating box, but the system wouldn't let me leave it blank: how typical of our culture where everything has to be ranked rather than discussed!)