John Clare, Politics and Poetry

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This text challenges the traditional portrait of poor John Clare , the helpless victim of personal and professional circumstance. Clare’s career has been presented as a disaster of editorial heavy-handedness, condescension, a poor market and conservative patronage. Yet Clare was not a passive victim. This study explores the sources of the poor Clare tradition, and recovers Clare’s agency, revealing a writer fully engaged in his own professional life and in the social and political questions of the day.