Disdaining Bounds of Place and Time,’ Staining Language with Furze and Burvine
John Clare’s Nomadic Poetics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12880919 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alysia E Garrison (University of California, Davis, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 376-387 |
| Publication date | 2006-03-13 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Literature Compass (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00315.x |
| OpenAlex | W2031661996 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
This essay was runner‐up in the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Romanticism Section. This article argues that the green Romanticist John Clare’s poetic œuvre has a “nomadic” orientation that troubles late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century enclosures of all kinds: spatial, grammatical, taxonomic, linguistic, and finally, political. This orientation was influenced in part by the gypsies who camped in and around Clare’s native Helpston, a people with whom he shared a similar rhizomatic relationship to language and space. Clare’s poetry and prose – like the itinerant gypsy population and Clare’s own wanderings – ambles over smooth space, cutting across the monolithic, totalizing systems of the state apparatus. Clare’s cited and uncited borrowings from gypsy oral and musical expression inflect his work, ultimately vexing state logics that on the one hand consider the gypsies to be foreigners, and on the other, believe local provincial language to be “pure,” native, and free from outside influences. Instead, Clare, peasant poet of little England and perhaps England’s best nature writer, is not particularly “England’s” possession at all: His poetic nomadology does not recognize state logics that parse out who is a citizen and who falls outside the sovereign’s protection. The unacknowledged force in John Clare’s work, I argue, is the implication that we are all “gangs” or gypsies, and all language is “argot” or slang: it is the law of the sovereign that has drawn the lines between people, language, and nation
Art · Linguistics · Literature · Peasant · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Possession (linguistics · Sovereignty · State (computer science · History · Law · Philosophy · Romani and Gypsy Studies · Water Resources and Governance
| Highly cited | No |
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