John Clare
In Our Time: Culture
BBC
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2017
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a programme first broadcast in 2017, 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
and
Simon Kövesi Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University
Producer: Simon Tillotson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:02.0 | Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. |
| 0:05.0 | There's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC in our time. |
| 0:12.0 | I hope you enjoy the programs. |
| 0:14.0 | Hello, John Claire is seen now as one of the great poets of the 19th century and according to one |
| 0:19.2 | of our guests today, the greatest laboring class poet that England has ever produced. |
| 0:24.0 | He was born in Helpston on the brink of the fence near Peterborough in 1793, and knew the world |
| 0:29.3 | around his cottage intimately. |
| 0:31.3 | His work describes nature and country life in an extraordinary level of detail |
| 0:35.0 | that few, if any, have been called before or since. And Claire also fires up against the threat |
| 0:40.2 | to that countryside. But this he achieved fame in his late 20s and they're often with the condescension from the |
| 0:46.9 | London literary world who made allowances for the man they called the Northamptonshire peasant |
| 0:51.3 | poet. |
| 0:52.3 | The last 24 years of his life were spent in what was then |
| 0:55.8 | called a lunatic asylum. With me to discuss the life and works of John Clare R. Sir Jonathan |
| 1:01.2 | Bait, Provost ofter College University of Oxford, |
| 1:04.0 | Meena Gorgi, senior lecturer in the English faculty and fellow Pembert College |
| 1:08.8 | Cambridge and Simon Kameshi Professor of English |
| 1:11.4 | at Oxford Brooks University. Jonathan Bates, what was the world |
| 1:16.6 | into which John Claire was born? |
| 1:18.1 | Okay, so he's born 1793, that's just after the French Revolution, contemporary of Lord Baron and John Keats. |
| 1:26.7 | But he's born deep in the countryside, this little village called Helpsden halfway between |
... |
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