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Description

    I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;

    My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

    I am the self-consumer of my woes—

    They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

    Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

    And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed



    Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

    Into the living sea of waking dreams,

    Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

    But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

    Even the dearest that I loved the best

    Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.



    I long for scenes where man hath never trod

    A place where woman never smiled or wept

    There to abide with my Creator, God,

    And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

    Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

    The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

  The poem is by John Clare, a strange and exceptional figure of late English Romanticism who bloomed as a "child of nature" in 1820's London for a while and was discarded later, like a songbird that had outlived its use. This is the sentiment expressed in the poem. His publisher friend, his letter correspondences, all gone or turned against him. In brief, he wrote very detailed nature poetry, but was admitted to a mental asylum in later years. His biography could best be summarized with the word "unfair." His poetry has real calibre, but he was dismissed throughout his life and then nearly forgotten.

_______________________________________________________

Clare originated from the rural poor. His mother used his earliest work, written on used, crumpled scraps stuffed into a hole in the kitchen wall, as kindling. The ink he had to make by himself, and it's too acidic - his words are even now eating away at the pages they were written on. The few notebooks he ever possessed, he used to the very last square centimetre. And he barely ever had any time to write. In the beginning years, he worked as an agricultural labourer. His community, a small village near Northampton, mocked him for dreaming beyond his circumstances. He at once hated them and yet was forced to identify with them by his wealthy patrons.

   The pastoral genre wasn't new back then, but it had had a cultural impact on high society. In essence, the rich romanticized life within nature to such a point that the suffering of rural workers wasn't too important to them. The ideal life was away from the big palaces of responsibility, in a little cottage with a pretty garden. As if to mock him, one of his richest patrons gave such a cottage to Clare for him to live in. It still stands. Whereas Clare had dreamt of ascending the social ladder and being accepted as a proper poet, he was merely the best among many bards of nature. He yearned to be accepted as a real poet who toiled and worried about his work, not as a natural genius - one of a simple mind that spewed great words. He was being kept poor to keep his style "authentic," but Clare had always been capable, not some sort of detailed, mechanical recorder of the things around him.

Additionaly, that nature he was describing to the delight of his patrons was no more - Enclosure of the land had left a lasting wound. To make matters worse, those pictures of landscapes and traditions were often recalled from his memory and tinted by sadness, longing. Very few traces of the ancient trees that he had climbed as a child remained, among many other things. What we don't understand as modern readers is the emotional impact this had on him. It's one of those peculiarities that sent him to the asylum, Clare was so rooted in the countryside around his home that its destruction shook him to the core, a part of him died with it, the pain was great. He lived in a world where vestiges of his past reminded him constantly of a much better world where the people around him had been much freer and happier, a world in which the rural poor still had had some form of dignity.

John Clare went insane. Many scholars and interdisciplinaries have speculated about the diagnosis, but it remains unclear. What is undeniable, however, is his intense hatred for the people who had scorned him and ignored his individuality and creative capacities for decades. As if to prove his proficiency, he wrote additions and alternate versions to Lord Byrons poetry. This was long understood to be an imitation of the great aristocratic rebel Romanticist, but in reality it was much more. Clare assumed his own stance on the works, changed things, experimented with rhyme schemes and flaunted his bitter mastery. Simultaneously, it becomes clear from the letters he sent on occasion that he sometimes didn't even know the difference between himself and Byron anymore. While he wanted to be recognized as his own man, he grew more disturbed. Nonetheless, the reason for why his mind was so fixated upon Byron is clear as glass. Byron died during Clare's lifetime, he even saw the funeral procession in London. Clare must have been well-aware of the controversy surrounding that man, who had lived in excess and scandal, and died as a war hero and revolutionary. Byron had lived without limits, and been fully accepted as a great writer. In quality of work, at least, Clare wants to show us in this adaptation: he could have been Byron's equal. This split in his identity, his very existence, is the other, secondary meaning of his poem. Not only does he detest the prison into which he has been cast, not only does he long for the past, and the open sky (that he describes as sacred, church-like) - his very existence is the first thing he tries to assume. There's even some analyses of the structure of this poem that read certain rifts in perception into the way the imagery wavers stanza to stanza.

_________________________________________________________

The truly postmodern aspect about Clare begins with the asylum years, which his where a contemporary author named Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Watchmen, etc) has picked Clare up, revived him for his own novel, and used him to make a very profound statement about artists within society that also goes very deep into his own fiction-magic. I've detailed that in my paper called "Sacrificing John Clare," which I've posted on my Deviantart account. At the centre of everything is the idea that all poets are really one poet, one fire. T.S. Eliot said something similar in his "Tradition and the Individual Talent" essay, where, by studying and assimilating tradition, a poet must at once comprehend the complexity of tradition and create a new combination of the established aspects of poetry, making each new work of art something that is both influenced by the past and yet influences the way we see the past. In a way, it's as though time didn't matter in this discussion, as though poetry, and art in the larger context, existed all at once.

Coming from this idea of timelessness, Moore wrote "Voice of the Fire" as a circle of short stories that, although ordered chronologically, all point toward the central concept of his novel without needing to be read in order. And of course, if you like it dark, Voice of the Fire is brutal, gritty, violent. But that might just be because it's a novel about Northampton, Alan Moore's hometown - where the stories, from 4000 BC to 1995, all take place. It's worth a read. Personally, I needed three reads, haha. But that's just because I had nothing to introduce me to the book properly . . .

As for why I have included John, my own character, in this picture - you might have noticed the similarity in name to John Clare - I once had a section of my own fictional work reserved for a portion of him existing in a similar state to Clare, wandering around nature aimlessly. Of course, back then, John was meant to be a universal expression of art, all art in me and the world. But that made him too devoid of character, and left my other dragon, Arthur, in the dust. Now I've split my creativity onto Arthur as the writer and John as the painter, and together they embody art more from my own personal viewpoint than something universal. I still like the concept I pursued with this, but it turned out to be too much for me. I still want to write something people can enjoy, first and foremost, and this would have been nothing but art-pour-l'art, from someone without proper writing mileage. So I was afraid it would be bullshit, and I'll be happier as I have it now.

Description

    I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;

    My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

    I am the self-consumer of my woes—

    They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

    Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

    And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed



    Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

    Into the living sea of waking dreams,

    Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

    But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

    Even the dearest that I loved the best

    Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.



    I long for scenes where man hath never trod

    A place where woman never smiled or wept

    There to abide with my Creator, God,

    And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

    Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

    The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

  The poem is by John Clare, a strange and exceptional figure of late English Romanticism who bloomed as a "child of nature" in 1820's London for a while and was discarded later, like a songbird that had outlived its use. This is the sentiment expressed in the poem. His publisher friend, his letter correspondences, all gone or turned against him. In brief, he wrote very detailed nature poetry, but was admitted to a mental asylum in later years. His biography could best be summarized with the word "unfair." His poetry has real calibre, but he was dismissed throughout his life and then nearly forgotten.

_______________________________________________________

Clare originated from the rural poor. His mother used his earliest work, written on used, crumpled scraps stuffed into a hole in the kitchen wall, as kindling. The ink he had to make by himself, and it's too acidic - his words are even now eating away at the pages they were written on. The few notebooks he ever possessed, he used to the very last square centimetre. And he barely ever had any time to write. In the beginning years, he worked as an agricultural labourer. His community, a small village near Northampton, mocked him for dreaming beyond his circumstances. He at once hated them and yet was forced to identify with them by his wealthy patrons.

   The pastoral genre wasn't new back then, but it had had a cultural impact on high society. In essence, the rich romanticized life within nature to such a point that the suffering of rural workers wasn't too important to them. The ideal life was away from the big palaces of responsibility, in a little cottage with a pretty garden. As if to mock him, one of his richest patrons gave such a cottage to Clare for him to live in. It still stands. Whereas Clare had dreamt of ascending the social ladder and being accepted as a proper poet, he was merely the best among many bards of nature. He yearned to be accepted as a real poet who toiled and worried about his work, not as a natural genius - one of a simple mind that spewed great words. He was being kept poor to keep his style "authentic," but Clare had always been capable, not some sort of detailed, mechanical recorder of the things around him.

Additionaly, that nature he was describing to the delight of his patrons was no more - Enclosure of the land had left a lasting wound. To make matters worse, those pictures of landscapes and traditions were often recalled from his memory and tinted by sadness, longing. Very few traces of the ancient trees that he had climbed as a child remained, among many other things. What we don't understand as modern readers is the emotional impact this had on him. It's one of those peculiarities that sent him to the asylum, Clare was so rooted in the countryside around his home that its destruction shook him to the core, a part of him died with it, the pain was great. He lived in a world where vestiges of his past reminded him constantly of a much better world where the people around him had been much freer and happier, a world in which the rural poor still had had some form of dignity.

John Clare went insane. Many scholars and interdisciplinaries have speculated about the diagnosis, but it remains unclear. What is undeniable, however, is his intense hatred for the people who had scorned him and ignored his individuality and creative capacities for decades. As if to prove his proficiency, he wrote additions and alternate versions to Lord Byrons poetry. This was long understood to be an imitation of the great aristocratic rebel Romanticist, but in reality it was much more. Clare assumed his own stance on the works, changed things, experimented with rhyme schemes and flaunted his bitter mastery. Simultaneously, it becomes clear from the letters he sent on occasion that he sometimes didn't even know the difference between himself and Byron anymore. While he wanted to be recognized as his own man, he grew more disturbed. Nonetheless, the reason for why his mind was so fixated upon Byron is clear as glass. Byron died during Clare's lifetime, he even saw the funeral procession in London. Clare must have been well-aware of the controversy surrounding that man, who had lived in excess and scandal, and died as a war hero and revolutionary. Byron had lived without limits, and been fully accepted as a great writer. In quality of work, at least, Clare wants to show us in this adaptation: he could have been Byron's equal. This split in his identity, his very existence, is the other, secondary meaning of his poem. Not only does he detest the prison into which he has been cast, not only does he long for the past, and the open sky (that he describes as sacred, church-like) - his very existence is the first thing he tries to assume. There's even some analyses of the structure of this poem that read certain rifts in perception into the way the imagery wavers stanza to stanza.

_________________________________________________________

The truly postmodern aspect about Clare begins with the asylum years, which his where a contemporary author named Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Watchmen, etc) has picked Clare up, revived him for his own novel, and used him to make a very profound statement about artists within society that also goes very deep into his own fiction-magic. I've detailed that in my paper called "Sacrificing John Clare," which I've posted on my Deviantart account. At the centre of everything is the idea that all poets are really one poet, one fire. T.S. Eliot said something similar in his "Tradition and the Individual Talent" essay, where, by studying and assimilating tradition, a poet must at once comprehend the complexity of tradition and create a new combination of the established aspects of poetry, making each new work of art something that is both influenced by the past and yet influences the way we see the past. In a way, it's as though time didn't matter in this discussion, as though poetry, and art in the larger context, existed all at once.

Coming from this idea of timelessness, Moore wrote "Voice of the Fire" as a circle of short stories that, although ordered chronologically, all point toward the central concept of his novel without needing to be read in order. And of course, if you like it dark, Voice of the Fire is brutal, gritty, violent. But that might just be because it's a novel about Northampton, Alan Moore's hometown - where the stories, from 4000 BC to 1995, all take place. It's worth a read. Personally, I needed three reads, haha. But that's just because I had nothing to introduce me to the book properly . . .

As for why I have included John, my own character, in this picture - you might have noticed the similarity in name to John Clare - I once had a section of my own fictional work reserved for a portion of him existing in a similar state to Clare, wandering around nature aimlessly. Of course, back then, John was meant to be a universal expression of art, all art in me and the world. But that made him too devoid of character, and left my other dragon, Arthur, in the dust. Now I've split my creativity onto Arthur as the writer and John as the painter, and together they embody art more from my own personal viewpoint than something universal. I still like the concept I pursued with this, but it turned out to be too much for me. I still want to write something people can enjoy, first and foremost, and this would have been nothing but art-pour-l'art, from someone without proper writing mileage. So I was afraid it would be bullshit, and I'll be happier as I have it now.