6 - John Clare’s Plants

Summary

This chapter traces John Clare’s unusual lifelong sympathy with plants. The bard of wildflowers wrote about the botanical world again and again, not only drawing on plants for numerous poems, but also recording his observations in botanical lists and Natural History Letters. Other men’s flowers, which he came across in his reading, cross-fertilized with his own habitual experience of local flora, to create poetry of startling freshness. The chapter draws primarily on Clare’s writings on flowers, trees, and grass but is also indebted to the work of key botanical critics and writers such as Molly Mahood and Richard Mabey, as well as recent environmental trends in Clare studies. Clare’s closely observed, celebratory, and elegiac poetry of plants demonstrates his vital importance for the twenty-first century, by alerting us to the irreplaceable value of the natural world.