My old friend David Bishop first introduced me to John Clare a almost a decade ago.
And so I was pleased the Radio 4 have rebroadcast this.*
"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".*
Picture; Harrowing in Mustard on stubble from A Farmer’s Year, 1899
*John Clare, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08cstfr
"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".*
Picture; Harrowing in Mustard on stubble from A Farmer’s Year, 1899
*John Clare, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08cstfr
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