Chapter 4 - Clare and Dislocation

Summary

“Clare and Dislocation” begins with one of Clare’s early sonnets ‘A Scene’ in which he challenged the conventional value of the presumed aesthetic power essential to picturesque landscape. He argued for an astonishing plenitude of living things, objects of all kinds, constituting what John Barrell called ‘a sense of place’. The rest of the chapter details Clare’s struggles when he was relocated from his home village of Helpston to Northborough two and a half miles away. He wrote poignantly about his sense of estrangement and loss, most famously in ‘The Flitting’. The chapter concentrates on ‘Decay: A Ballad’, and then takes up his sonnet-writing as both a complex poetic practice and as a method for negotiating a new place. The chapter ends with a reading of his prose fragment ‘Autumn’, describing a walk through the local Deeping Fen and written in the months before his final incarceration in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Memory, estrangement and loss ultimately create a negative ‘sense of place’.