English poet John Clare (1793-1864) In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg

John Clare: In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Northamptonshire poet John Clare who, according to one of Melvyn's guests Jonathan Bate, was 'the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced'. Clare worked in a tavern, as a gardener and as a farm labourer in the early 19th century and achieved his first literary success with Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. He was praised for his descriptions of rural England and his childhood there, and his reaction to the changes he saw in the Agricultural Revolution with its enclosures, displacement and altered, disrupted landscape. Despite poor mental health and, from middle age onwards, many years in asylums, John Clare continued to write and he is now seen as one of the great poets of his age.
With
Sir Jonathan Bate
Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford
Mina Gorji
Senior Lecturer in the English Faculty and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge
Simon Kövesi
Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University
Presenter Melvyn Bragg
Producer: Simon Tillotson.

John Clare 1793-1864
http://www.clarecottage.org/
John Clare, our most remarkable poet of the English countryside, was born in the village of Helpston, Northamptonshire and raised as an agricultural labourer.
Clare’s genius was his ability to observe and record the minutiae of English nature and every aspect rural life, at a time when enclosures were transforming the landscape and sweeping away centuries of traditional custom and labour.
Following great success with his first published poems (outselling even John Keats) Clare quickly became unfashionable, falling quickly into literary obscurity. The magnitude of Clare’s achievement and poetic genius was not fully appreciated until the recent publication of a first complete edition of his poetry, much of which had remained neglected in manuscript archives for 150 years. Now scholars worldwide regard him as one of our leading poets gradually affording the same status as reputed poet contemporaries such as William Wordsworth and S.T.Coleridge.
Clare’s birthplace and family home for many years was acquired by the John Clare Trust in 2005. Its transformation into an education and visiting centre celebrates Clare’s life and inspires visitors to share in his creativity, his passion for nature and the countryside and his environmental engagement.