8 - Clare and Ecocriticism

Summary

This chapter explores the relationship between John Clare’s writing and the evolving discipline of ecocriticism which, in its broadest terms, treats literature as a representation of the physical world and the reader as a mediator between these complex environments. Clare’s work was central to the early ecocritical canon of the 1990s and continues, in more recent years, to shape our understanding of how and why environmental writing matters, particularly in a context of ecological despoliation, species extinction, and global warming. That Clare’s resolutely local voice and perspective should be at all relevant to an understanding of our broader world speaks to the challenge that he poses to modern readers by the example of his own relation to natural otherness. That relation, exemplified in poems such as ‘The Nightingales Nest’, is predicated on habits of attention and self-circumscription, a sequence by which the poet as ecological actor evokes the experience of coexistence.