C lare, J ohn, Poetry

At first glance John Clare's career as a poet appears highly unlikely. Born to an illiterate mother and a barely literate father, the beneficiary of only a few years formal schooling, Clare (1793–1864) seemed destined to become a landless agricultural day‐labourer like his father. His path from reclusive prodigy, reading and writing on the sly while neglecting his rural occupations, to one of the best‐selling poets in England in the early 1820s, may strike us as a miraculous set of coincidences: his discovery of Thompson's The Seasons when he was 13; his ‘natural’ adaptation of Thompson's Georgics into an elegiac defence of the disappearing landscape of his home village and its environs through enclosure; his large body of manuscript poems coming into the hands of the Stamford bookseller Edward Drury; the coincidence that Drury's cousin was John Taylor; Taylor's ambition to be a serious literary publisher; and so on. The appearance of Clare's first volume, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery , depended on each of these factors falling into place. However, as the three‐volume Pickering and Chatto edition of Labouring‐Class Poets: 1700–1800 demonstrates, the taste for unaffected, descriptive verse produced by ‘natural geniuses’ was well established, and it comes as no surprise that Drury recognized Clare's genius and wrested control of the manuscript from Henson, another Stamford bookseller. In light of this tradition, the idea that a provincial bookseller would be on the lookout for ‘natural genius’ seems less remarkable. Indeed, receiving credit for the discovery was so important to Drury that he attempted to withhold the manuscript from Taylor when he felt the credit slipping away to his cousin.