This chapter explores the perceptual acts modelled by John Clare’s poetry, especially in encounters with the more-than-human world. Rather than foregrounding the ways a perceiving ego shapes a landscape, Clare details situations and perspectives readers can imaginatively enter and emphasizes the ways that the situations themselves invite receptivity. He normalizes ecologically attuned modes of perception by presenting them as enabled by the places, plants, and animals his speakers encounter more than the speakers themselves. Focusing on poems that place speakers among or beneath birds and weeds, including ‘To an Insignificant Flower’, ‘The Fens’, and some shorter bird poems, Falke describes the poetic means through which Clare encourages epistemological humility and other-directedness. She then articulates a mode of reading Clare’s poetry based on these same perceptual habits.

This introduction offers a brief account of Clare’s biography, drawing attention to some of the major events in his life, and some of the aspects of his life and his work which have most interested critics. It goes on to offer an extended close reading of one of Clare’s poems, in order to demonstrate the ways in which Clare is able to write within convention, but also to develop a unique poetic voice. By examining his engagement with the aesthetic discourse of the picturesque as exemplary, it argues for his particular capacity both to reflect and to enable reflection upon Romantic-period issues and debates, and also for the originality of Clare’s posture and verse.

Almost immediately after its publication in 1770, writers recognized The Deserted Village as a politically radical poem. This view is reflected in several imitations published in Britain in the decades immediately following. Writers in the British colonies in North America and the early United States adapted the poem to other ends, replacing the temporal relationship between the two Auburns in Goldsmith’s poem with a spatial relationship. This substitution allowed them to read The Deserted Village as a description of England and the Auburn of old as a representation of the promise of the emerging nation. This chapter traces the afterlife of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, his only poem to have had a considerable influence on other poets, from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reworkings in Britain and America through to contemporary reimaginings by Irish poets.

Romantic-era writing affirms the ideal of a bond between human and animal, while often showing this bond destroyed by the killing of the nonhuman animal. This chapter explores the treatment of such bonds, and their destruction, in the light of Mark Payne’s argument that literary representations of dying animals incorporate a sacrificial logic by which the nonhuman animal’s death enables the development of the fully human subject and the expression of that humanity in writing. In Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, William Wordsworth’s Hart-Leap Well, Lord Byron’s Mazeppa, and William Blake’s "The Fly," I argue that elements of this "humanizing" process can be traced, but that the poems are characterized by ambivalence: too troubled by animal death, too uncertain about the efficacy of the message they attempt to draw from it, or in the case of “The Fly,” too wedded to the radical equivalence of all beings to be fully committed to a story of progress through sacrifice. The chapter ends with a discussion of John Clare’s badger poems and “To the Snipe,” in which there is a radical refusal of sacrificial logic.

Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden both saw action and survived into the late twentieth century as successful men of letters whose styles were quite different. This chapter looks at their literary friendship and compares their work, clarifying where they stand in relation to the Georgians and other war poets, while putting them in a broader cultural perspective. It shows how experience of the trenches led them to twist traditional forms, and examines the stylistic and personal challenges they faced as survivors, their writings ever more retrospective. It argues that Blunden’s complexpoetry may feel archaic but has Modernist elements and has been unjustly neglected by comparison with Sassoon’s more accessible but less subtle verse. With close analysis and comparison, and some redefining of key texts, the chapter emphasises their contrasting approaches: Blunden the troubled pastoralist, exploring profounder shades of meaning; Sassoon deliberately ‘anti-poetic’, but with satirical designs on us.

This chapter argues that the East Anglian Fens, a 1,500-square-mile diamond of flat, low-lying land given over largely to agriculture, are a perfect test case for thinking about georgic at the level of landscape. An ancient landscape that seems to forbid organic metaphor, the Fens can seem like perpetually un-reclaimed literary ground. Yet since Caryl Churchill’s Fen (1982) and Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) contemporary authors have found a more involving territory there than in more conventionally literary landscapes in the Lakes, the Yorkshire Moors or the Wessex uplands. The history of the Fens places often remote and lonely agricultural lives in a setting shaped by mighty human efforts against huge natural forces, especially those of river and sea. In the fens it is easy for georgic writing to lose its human scale. Here both farmer and writer must make a reckoning with everything that the landscape has excluded.

John Clare’s transcription of the nightingale’s song has been praised as ‘the most accurate rendering in words of any bird’s voice for nearly a century’. But the so-called ‘peasant poet’ was not naïve. Chapter four argues that Clare’s educational background and multifarious interests in poetry, science and natural history made him singly alert to the difficulties inherent within his own attempt to ‘syllable the sounds’ of the nightingale. The chapter places Clare’s writing in a pivotal, though pre-Darwinian, stage of the ‘science of birdsong’: a period in which all kinds of ‘facts’ about birdsong were being collected, compared and vigorously disputed. Watching the bird closely as it inwardly mutters its undersong, or stammers or hurries over ill-remembered passages, Clare witnessed the kind of behaviour which would ultimately challenge the ‘foolish lyes’ uttered by both poets and philosophers regarding how and why birds sing. By exploring the deep connections which Clare draws between the ‘muttering’ of the bird while practising its songs and his own processes of composition, the chapter seeks to challenge and break down some of the binary distinctions which have framed responses to the writings of this so-called ‘peasant-poet’: ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, ‘instinctive’ and ‘learned’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘premeditated’ art.

The chapter seeks to problematize what it means to ‘map’ literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the example of Romantic poet John Clare. The first half of the chapter rereads Clare through one critical and two creative interpretations of his sense of place and space, by John Barrell, Franco Moretti, and Iain Sinclair. Reading Clare in, and through, others generates a multilayered response that highlights the range of spatial forms of interpretation embraced by literary studies whilst also critically interpreting both maps and texts used in those arguments. The second half of the chapter offers a fresh reading-as-mapping of Clare by prioritizing time over space, drawing upon a concept articulated by French historian Pierre Nora, that of lieux de mémoire (sites/realms of memory). Nora’s model of the loss of shared, lived history and its memorialization in fixed sites is applied to Clare to enable a move from a focus on the predominantly spatial to the spatio-temporal. Does the concept of lieux de mémoire only work at a macro level, or can be localized in an individual? This section seeks to come at place through the memory that it embodies.