Northborough Sonnets

John Clare was a practitioner of the sonnet form at all periods of his poetic career. The sonnets he produced in the last years before his institutionalization in 1837, first at High Beech and then in Northampton General Asylum, are of interest, since he exploited the brevity of the form to express a simultaneous precision of observation and starkness of vision that he rarely achieved either before or after. This volume contains all the sonnets that Clare wrote at Northborough between 1832 and 1837 with the exception of those included in The Midsummer Cushion and The Rural Muse . This collection allows the reader to trace the development of Clare’s handling of the form in this period. They constitute vignettes of rural life in the early-19th century and the record of a poetic sensibility. This text is part of the John Clare Programme .