Midsummer Cushion

Clare John

Clare records that it was "a very old custom among villagers in summer time to stock a piece of greensward full of field flowers & place it a an ornament in their cottages which ornaments are called Midsummer Cushions". This "cottage custom" suggested the title to him for this collection.

The text of the poems has been prepared from Clare's own fair-copy in Peterborough Museum (MS A54), and is, as far as possible, an exact transcription of his own punctuation and spelling. Every effort has been taken to ensure that the reader is able to get back to the authentic voice of Clare.

Here, for the first time, is the book which John Clare himself wanted to publish in 1832, but for which he could not find a sufficient number of subscribers. It is an irony which Clare would have appreciated that it took almost 150 years to bring out the book. Almost a third of the book's 361 poems are now published for the first time.

We should now be in a position to give Clare the recognition he desired – not as a peasant phenomenon – but as our foremost naturalist poet in the tradition of "national" poetry in which the English countryside is rendered with almost obsessive accuracy.

About the Author

John Clare (1793-1864): Born the son of a thresher at Helpston, Northamptonshire, John Clare is a rural poet and story teller. He is a poet of spiritual originality, as compelling at his best as "Crabbe and Wordsworth" as a story teller in verse. He was an assiduous practitioner of the sonnet form at all periods of his poetic career. The sonnets he produced in the last few years before his institutionalisation in 1837, first at High Beech and then in Northampton General Asylum, are of particular interest, since he exploited the inherent brevity of the form to express a simultaneous precision of observation and starkness of vision that he rarely achieved either before or after.

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