John Clare in Context

The marginalization of John Clare’s poetry, despite renewed interest in Romanticism and the literature of madness, is still an enigma. This important collection of new critical essays provides a welcome reappraisal in the wake of Clare’s bicentenary, and will be a landmark in the history of his reception. It includes chapters on landscape and botany, Clare’s politics, his madness, Clare and the critics, and a remarkable essay by Seamus Heaney on Clare’s importance as a poetic precursor.