̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Centre for John Clare Studies

Poet, activist, bird watcher: exploring John Clare as nature writer

amb206 — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 08:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��poet John Clare (1793-1864) was a keen natural historian who knew the countryside in all its moods. His various jobs saw him labouring in farms and gardens; his gravestone remembers him as the ‘peasant poet’. Best known for his verse, Clare also wrote prose accounts of the plants and animals he observed in his native Northamptonshire.

In a foreword to the anthology, ̽��ֱ��Poetry of Birds, broadcaster and bird watcher Tim Dee notes that Clare wrote about 147 species of British wild birds “without any technical kit whatsoever”. His records contain 65 first descriptions of birds for Northamptonshire alone. ̽��ֱ��term ‘nature writing’ had yet to be coined in the early 1800s – but Clare was undoubtedly ahead of his time in the way that he wove his detailed observations of the natural world into his writing.

Dee is one of the speakers who will be talking about ‘Clare and the Art of Bird Watching’ at a symposium held on September 15, 2017 at the David Attenborough Building. ̽��ֱ��event is a collaboration between the Centre for John Clare Studies (English Faculty) and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI), itself a partnership between Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� and a cluster of conservation organisations.

CCI’s emerging programme on the arts, science and conservation is coordinated by Dr John Fanshawe, who has been seconded from Birdlife International. He explains: “Bringing together academics and practitioners is a core ambition of the community in the David Attenborough Building. John Clare, both as a poet and activist, is a perfect catalyst for exploring the close observation and in situ localism in which so much conservation is rooted.”

̽��ֱ��symposium will bring together literary scholars with ornithologists, nature writers and artists to consider what it means to observe and record birds. How, for example, does Clare look and watch, and how does he translate what he observes into words? How do today’s artists and writers respond to his work?

“ ̽��ֱ��idea is to raise questions about the act of bird watching, recording, understanding and classification, both in the early 19th century and the present day, dwelling in particular on the importance of localism and the distinctiveness of Clare’s environment and voice to his writing about birds,” says Dr Sarah Houghton-Walker from the Centre for John Clare Studies.

Academics speaking at the symposium include Dr Francesca MacKenney (Bristol), Dr Mina Gorji (Cambridge) and Dr Jos Smith ( ̽��ֱ�� of East Anglia). Participants will also hear from printmaker Carry Akroyd, textile artist Anita Bruce, and nature writers Alex Preston and Derek Niemann.

Clare’s work has long inspired artists whose work celebrates the natural world. Akroyd says: “John Clare is such a visual poet. He wrote outside, his eyes wide open to everything, and wrote inside with visual memory. He switches between a wide-angle bird’s eye-view of the landscape to hand-lens detail, and even now makes us see more.”

Birds soar through the lines of English poetry, but for Clare’s contemporaries they played an especially important symbolic role. “Shelley’s skylark is transcendentally a spirit. Keats’ nightingale is significant because it represents a sublime kind of not-knowing,” says Houghton-Walker.

Clare, however, insists on the real and the particular. He knows exactly how and where the birds he writes about nest; he knows how many eggs those birds lay; and he leaves behind a meticulous record of every detail, right down to the appearance of the markings on each egg.

“He’s intensely interested in habitat, behaviour and song, but also, increasingly, in the threats to birds from his fellow men. He insists on a vital accuracy in his descriptions which continue to astonish scientific natural historians, and yet produces poetry about birds which can claim to be some of the very best in the language,” says Houghton-Walker.

“Clare’s greatest achievement is the conjunction of scientific accuracy with what he calls ‘poetic feeling’. He possesses a depth of knowledge only achievable by painstaking observation of birds’ behaviour as it changes with the seasons. He scorns those poets who don’t take the time to watch and merely recycle, often inaccurate, poetic conventions.

His patient observation is rewarded with an intimate knowledge which is exhibited throughout his prose and poetry. He’s especially fascinated by nests – something that has been discussed by many critics.”

A determination to represent nature accurately led to struggles, too. Voicing his frustration at his inability adequately to transcribe the song of the nightingale, Clare wrote that “many of her notes are sounds that cannot be written the alphabet having no letters that can syllable the sounds”.

MacKenney says: “Clare was extraordinarily inventive in his attempts to get the sounds of birds into his own writing. But the ‘peasant-poet’ was not naive. Throughout his poetry Clare demonstrates a profound respect for the abiding 'mystery' of birds and their songs.”

Without binoculars and with nothing but his senses to rely on, Clare gave us some of the most compelling nature writing of the 19th century.

To illustrate some of the wonders of birds and their behaviour, the symposium will include a screening of ‘Murmuration X 10’, a short film by filmmaker Sarah Wood and Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk, and a guided tour of the avian collection at the Museum of Zoology.

For more details and to book a place at the symposium ‘Clare and the Art of Bird Watching’ click here.

Inset image: Carry Akroyd's ‘Evening Crows’ linocut illustration from 'This Happy Spirit’.

At a symposium next month (15 September 2017) academics, artists and ornithologists will share their responses to the work of 19th-century poet John Clare, whose patient and accurate observations of birds in field and hedgerow continue to astonish and inspire.

Clare’s greatest achievement is the conjunction of scientific accuracy with what he calls ‘poetic feeling’. He possesses a depth of knowledge only achievable by painstaking observation of birds’ behaviour as it changes with the seasons.

Sarah Houghton-Walker

Carry Akroyd

'Swifts' lithograph from Carry Akroyd's 'Found in the Fields' series (detail)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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'Besom ling and teasel burrs': John Clare and botanising

amb206 — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 08:09:00 +0000

,In his early years, the poet John Clare worked as a gardener at Burghley House, a Tudor mansion just outside Stamford. Later, he struck up a close friendship with Joseph Henderson, an enthusiastic naturalist and head gardener at Milton Hall, an imposing house set in acres of lush parkland to the north of Peterborough. ̽��ֱ��letters sent between Clare and Henderson reveal their exchange of expertise, and also their shared interest in expanding their botanical knowledge through the pages of the numerous botanical volumes in the Milton Hall library.

In letters and manuscripts now housed in libraries in Peterborough and Northampton, Clare describes his efforts to grow in his own cottage garden some of the species he has encountered at Burghley and Milton. October 1824 finds him working ‘in the garden at making a shed for my ariculas’. Later, in one of many lists, he records the names of the auriculas he admires but is unable to afford. In November 1824 he notes that he has ‘received a parcel of Ferns & flowers from Henderson the common Polipody…the harts tongue… the Lady fern… tall white Lychnis with seven new sorts of Chrysanthemums…”.

Clare’s deep interest in plants, his love of 'botanising' and the significance of plants in his writing, is the focus of a symposium taking place next week at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Botanic Garden. ̽��ֱ��meeting will bring together botanists, nature writers, artists and literary scholars to look afresh at the poet’s relationship with the environment. It has been organised by the Centre for John Clare Studies in the Faculty of English, set up earlier this year by Dr Paul Chirico (Senior Tutor at Fitzwilliam College), Dr Mina Gorji and Dr Sarah Houghton-Walker, to mark the 150^th anniversary of Clare’s death.

It was at Northampton General Lunatic Asylum that Clare died, aged 70, on 20 May 1864. His gravestone in Helpston churchyard remembers him as ‘ ̽��ֱ��Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’ and each summer children from the primary school that bears his name lay flowers on his resting place, in the form of Midsummer Cushions - a tradition dating back to Clare’s day of making cushions of turf studded with meadow flowers.

̽��ֱ��term ‘Peasant Poet’, with its implications of lack of education, is a label that belies Clare’s intellect as someone hungry for knowledge and quick to learn. As the son of a poor farm labourer, his formal education was at best sporadic and confined to village ‘vestry’ and ‘dame’s schools’; he left school early to take a job to help support his family.

Clare read widely and engaged as much as he was able with contemporary debates on everything from politics to art theory, from religion to natural history. He tutored himself in mathematics and read a wide range of poetry, prose and drama. Many of his books are now housed in their original wooden bookcase in Northampton Public Library.

Houghton-Walker said: “We hope that next week’s symposium will encourage a conversation about Clare’s intense curiosity regarding the plants he observed in field and garden, and his desire to understand and catalogue them according to the latest scientific methods. He made close observations of plant habitats, recording how different species related to one other, and he collected many botanical specimens. His poems bear witness to his minute observations of flora.”

It is evident, however, that Clare struggled with the Linnaean system and its reliance on hard-to-pronounce Latin nomenclature. In his journal for October 1824, he records a plan to collect a book and ‘call it 'A Garden of Wild Flowers', as it shall contain nothing else with quotations from poets & others an English Botany on this plan would be very interesting & serve to make Botany popular while the hard nicknaming system of unutterable words now in vogue only overloads it in mystery till it makes it darkness visible’.

Clare enjoyed brief spells of acclaim during his lifetime and gained the support of a number of benefactors. But for many years his poetry lapsed into obscurity. It was only in the early 20th century that writers and editors such as Arthur Symons and Edward Thomas brought his work once again to public attention. Since then, he has been championed by poets such as Ted Hughes, John Ashbery, Elaine Feinstein, Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin. Today Clare’s close engagement with the natural world chimes with a resurgence of interest in nature writing.

̽��ֱ��poet's celebration of flora and fauna is often discussed in terms of his love of wilderness and his resistance to the enclosure movement and resulting changes in farming practices that were threatening to destroy the countryside he knew ‘with its besom ling and teasel burrs’. Eager to record and preserve, in writing, the environment he felt was under threat, he set himself the task of documenting the natural world around his village in Northamptonshire. In 1824 he began to write down his observations in a group of letters which have come to be known as an unfinished Natural History of Helpston. Despite the increasing popularity of Clare’s poetry, these were not published until 1983.

̽��ֱ��guest speakers invited to address the symposium reflect its aim to mesh together poetry and botany. They include Professor John Parker, former director of the Botanic Garden, as well as its current director, Professor Beverley Glover, who will lead a tour of the Garden’s systematic beds.

Professor Fiona Stafford from Oxford ̽��ֱ��, an expert on literature and landscape, will talk about ‘Clare and the Splendid Sycamore’. Stafford has delivered two series on ' ̽��ֱ��Meaning of Trees' for Radio 3. She said: “Clare's wonderful sonnet on ' ̽��ֱ��Sycamore' is based on first hand observation of a tree that has often been overlooked, and even condemned, for being common and invasive. Clare's great gift is to see glory in the commonplace - and, in doing so, open the eyes of readers to things so familiar as to be virtually invisible.”

As well as demonstrating his understanding of the interconnectedness of the environment, Clare’s poems reveal that his interest in botanical classification registered and responded to his own feelings about social class. He was born into poverty, one of a pair of twins, the only one to survive, and his tiny frame may have been a result of malnutrition. Like his father, he began work as a farm labourer while still a boy. Beset by terrible depression, he struggled to make ends meet all his life and, as a working class poet, formed relationships with people from different social strata but never felt entirely accepted by them.

Dr Sue Edney from Bath Spa ̽��ֱ�� will look at the ways in which botanical classification is in itself class-based and how plants in their ‘place’ become caught up in this process of identification and division through naming. She said: “Clare’s mingling of Latin names with common English names, of Linnaean systems with ‘natural’ ones, is related to his self-positioning as a natural poet – a poet related to his place – combined with his desire to become an establishment writer.”

̽��ֱ��writer Richard Mabey made his name in the early 1970s with his seminal book Food for Free and has since written extensively on people, plants and the things that bind them together. His 2007 book Nature Cure charts his experience of breakdown and recovery – and the role of nature as healer. As a Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, where he is working on a book due out next year, he will talk about ‘Clare and the plant’s point of view’, exploring Clare’s distinctive ability to put himself in the position of his poetic subjects – in this case, the plants he loved and wrote about.

Hetty Saunders is just embarking on an MPhil at Wolfson College, Cambridge, where she will be writing a dissertation on Clare and botany. In looking at the complex relationship that Clare created between plants, landscapes and texts, she will discuss the way that Clare often related his writing to plants of the field, and vice versa, as in this quote from his poem ‘Remembrances’: ‘… my poesys all cropt in a sunny hour/As keepsakes and pledges all to never fade away’.

Among the participants at the symposium will be two artists, Anita Bruce and Kathryn Parsons, members of the five-strong UnEarthed collective who have been resident artists this year at Clare Cottage, Helpston. Kathryn Parson’s ‘I Found the Poems in the Fields’ renders Clare’s intimate observations of nature in delicate hand-modelled porcelain. Her creations tell of the layered platelets of lichen colonies from Royce Wood and Lolham Bridges, and the bold architectural plants found at Swaddywell, all sites known and written about by Clare.

John Clare's Cottage was renovated and established as an educational centre in 2009 by the John Clare Trust, of which Paul Chirico is vice-chair. ̽��ֱ��cottage has a garden designed by Adam Frost which won a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2012. ̽��ֱ��landscapes around the village, though much affected by agricultural and social changes since Clare’s birth in 1793, still include many of the features that he loved to visit and described so precisely.

̽��ֱ��symposium ‘John Clare and Botany’ will take place at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Botanic Garden on 23 September. ̽��ֱ��event is fully booked.

Inset images: John Clare as a young man (Creative Commons); inscription from Clare's grave in Helpston (Geoff Shipp); sycamore tree (Creative Commons); John Clare's cottage garden with porcelain installations by Kathryn Parsons (UnEarthed)

A symposium taking place on Tuesday (23 September 2014) at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Botanic Garden will unite artists, writers, scientists and literary scholars to look at the poet John Clare’s close engagement with the natural environment as a botanist as well as poet.

Clare’s mingling of Latin names with common English names, of Linnaean systems with ‘natural’ ones, is related to his self-positioning as a natural poet – a poet related to his place – combined with his desire to become an establishment writer.

Sue Edney, Bath Spa ̽��ֱ��

Anita Bruce (UnEarthed)

Swaddywell Pit near Helpston, Northants

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