Clare's Empire

Book excerpt: The seventh full-length collection of poems from the Edward E. Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College in Schenectady, New York, is a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare. Of his inspiration, Professor Smith writes: "Although it draws on Clare’s writings and on the available biographies, it makes no pretense to biographical accuracy. Clare’s poems interested me because of the combination of a natural sympathy, sometimes sentimental or conventional but often deeply felt especially for creatures or people on the margins, and a ferocity that arose both from the rigors of the natural world and from a sense of injustice at what humans do so readily to that world and to each other. Clare’s life, a series of almost impossible negotiations between ignorance and knowledge, gift and condescension, poetry and privilege, appetite and refinement, seemed to me to raise issues that have hardly gone away: class, liberty, ecological responsibility, the rights of imagination and the rights of property. The intent of the poems is to present moments from that life at a high pitch of tension and to consider how little has changed."