of the Black Mountain poet Charles Olson, promoted ‘open field’ poetics. A system which sat nicely alongside Barrell's work on Helpston and enclosures. ‘The eye, snatched to the horizon, roams,’ Barrell said. Clare's work belonged in the closed system of traditional forms. When the circle of Helpston landscape, once open and common to all, was hedged and divided into a complex jigsaw, John Clare was one of the hedgers. He needed the work. The rest of his life would be a series of personal enclosures, from London drawing rooms to Epping Forest, to the imposed restrictions of the Northampton years.
Moving , Raworth's 1971 publication, opens with a quote from Clare (placed against a page of coloured Camel cigarette packets by Joe Brainard). Icons of mass production find themselves in the company of lines from a famously grim asylum poem by John Clare: ‘I am’.
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;
Even the dearest that I love the best
Are strange – nay, rather – stranger than the rest.
I'm not sure how many readers, at that time, picked up on Raworth's choice of epigraph; Jonathan Bate in his chapter on Clare as ‘The Poet's Poet’ doesn't find room for it. He traces an orthodox anthology of influence: Norman Gale, Arthur Symons, Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden, Geoffrey Grigson, Robert Graves, Sidney Keyes, John Ashbery, Patrick Kavanagh, Tom Paulin, R. S. Thomas. Poets needing compensatory values in time of war, damaged rhymers and soil worshippers, thick in the tongue.
Raworth's ‘HELPSTON £9,850. STONE BUILT RESIDENCE’ takes an oblique, ‘open field’ approach. Snippet fromnewspaper. John Barrell's eighteenth-century notion of ‘view’ acknowledged but found to be out of service: ‘the view is again unapproachable’. The Helpston cottage has become an illustration in an estate agent's window. Clare's father trying to make the rent from the sale of apples, years of debt, fear of eviction, has now been translated into an aspirational lifestyle. Brandt's Gothic shipwreck, submerged in fog (but solid, rooted in melancholy), becomes a colour print, a development opportunity. A Victorian terraced house in Hackney, at the time of Raworth's quoted price, would sell for around £4,000. Large properties in squares approved by John Betjeman could be found for £7,000. And Helpston's once-spurned peasant cottage, with ‘unapproachable’ views, commands almost £10,000.
‘The surface mysticism of the rich,’ Raworth writes, ‘which has eaten our country boys.’ The functioning village, dependent on the benevolence of landowners, the patronage of parsons, the social ambitions of tenant farmers, has dissolved. Expensive properties and nobody at home. ‘You change constantly/ a dog: a clown,’ Raworth continues. ‘Clown’ being one of Clare's favourite ways of describing his neighbours, or indeed himself (when he ventured into polite company, mud of the fields on his boots). The clowns have ambled off into Fenland murk. The village is deserted. And betrayed. Clare is nostalgic about nostalgia, the old wound, the site from which he has been expelled – but where he still lives. Lost muse (two miles down the road in Glinton). Lost childhood (always present but out of reach). A cliff at the end of the world. The pit beyond the horizon out of which all evil things come.
Our weary trio, the latest cultural pirates, attempting to force meaning from the standing monuments of a future suburb, abandon the cottage and move away down the village street, Woodgate, past the Blue Bell (where young Clare worked and later drank), towards St Botolph's Church. We are conscious of trespassing in a heritage zone: the Clare memorial with its dates and anodyne verse, the Market Cross, the road out.
We try a little unconvinced sitting around on a bench under thetrees, celebrating the fact of
Moving , Raworth's 1971 publication, opens with a quote from Clare (placed against a page of coloured Camel cigarette packets by Joe Brainard). Icons of mass production find themselves in the company of lines from a famously grim asylum poem by John Clare: ‘I am’.
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;
Even the dearest that I love the best
Are strange – nay, rather – stranger than the rest.
I'm not sure how many readers, at that time, picked up on Raworth's choice of epigraph; Jonathan Bate in his chapter on Clare as ‘The Poet's Poet’ doesn't find room for it. He traces an orthodox anthology of influence: Norman Gale, Arthur Symons, Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden, Geoffrey Grigson, Robert Graves, Sidney Keyes, John Ashbery, Patrick Kavanagh, Tom Paulin, R. S. Thomas. Poets needing compensatory values in time of war, damaged rhymers and soil worshippers, thick in the tongue.
Raworth's ‘HELPSTON £9,850. STONE BUILT RESIDENCE’ takes an oblique, ‘open field’ approach. Snippet fromnewspaper. John Barrell's eighteenth-century notion of ‘view’ acknowledged but found to be out of service: ‘the view is again unapproachable’. The Helpston cottage has become an illustration in an estate agent's window. Clare's father trying to make the rent from the sale of apples, years of debt, fear of eviction, has now been translated into an aspirational lifestyle. Brandt's Gothic shipwreck, submerged in fog (but solid, rooted in melancholy), becomes a colour print, a development opportunity. A Victorian terraced house in Hackney, at the time of Raworth's quoted price, would sell for around £4,000. Large properties in squares approved by John Betjeman could be found for £7,000. And Helpston's once-spurned peasant cottage, with ‘unapproachable’ views, commands almost £10,000.
‘The surface mysticism of the rich,’ Raworth writes, ‘which has eaten our country boys.’ The functioning village, dependent on the benevolence of landowners, the patronage of parsons, the social ambitions of tenant farmers, has dissolved. Expensive properties and nobody at home. ‘You change constantly/ a dog: a clown,’ Raworth continues. ‘Clown’ being one of Clare's favourite ways of describing his neighbours, or indeed himself (when he ventured into polite company, mud of the fields on his boots). The clowns have ambled off into Fenland murk. The village is deserted. And betrayed. Clare is nostalgic about nostalgia, the old wound, the site from which he has been expelled – but where he still lives. Lost muse (two miles down the road in Glinton). Lost childhood (always present but out of reach). A cliff at the end of the world. The pit beyond the horizon out of which all evil things come.
Our weary trio, the latest cultural pirates, attempting to force meaning from the standing monuments of a future suburb, abandon the cottage and move away down the village street, Woodgate, past the Blue Bell (where young Clare worked and later drank), towards St Botolph's Church. We are conscious of trespassing in a heritage zone: the Clare memorial with its dates and anodyne verse, the Market Cross, the road out.
We try a little unconvinced sitting around on a bench under thetrees, celebrating the fact of
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