Champion for the Poor

Political Poetry and Prose

Clare John

"A Champion for the Poor" brings together for the first time John Clare's longest poem, "The Parish" – in a new and corrected text – and his forceful satires "The Hue & Cry" and "The Summons". Some previously unpublished poems are included, too. There are also essays, letters and fragments – advice to his children, reflections on Enclosure, observations of social custom and social ill – which illuminate the poems and enhance our sense of Clare and his attitudes to the political and social conditions and events of his age.

The Introduction evokes the context of Clare's writings and the difficulties he faced as a labourer voicing the concerns of his class at a time when such matters were regarded as the exclusive province of the educated and propertied classes. Notes and a glossary of unfamiliar words are included. Readers can at last assess a neglected aspect of Clare's work.

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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