40. Mad John Clare sings the Blues

„I am — yet what I am, none cares or knows“ is the first line of John Clare’s most famous poem, and a more irresistible invitation to a biographer would be difficult to imagine. Jonathan Bate, an English academic, has responded with a fat tome that lays out a fair amount of what’s known about this strange and often wonderful writer’s life, and — almost in spite of itself — makes us care. Clare, unlike his Romantic contemporaries Byron, Shelley and Keats, lived to a ripish old age (70), but the long tale “John Clare: A Biography“ tells is at least as sad as their foreshortened ones, because he spent better than a third of his span in lunatic asylums — where on a good day he might turn out a lyric as starkly beautiful as “Lines: I Am,“ and on a bad day might cover pages and pages with stanzas from his own “Don Juan“ and “Childe Harold,“ under the delusion that he was in fact Lord Byron. / Terence Rafferty, NYT 15.2.04

JOHN CLARE
A Biography.
By Jonathan Bate.
Illustrated. 648 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40.

Die Besprechung birgt nebenbei einen kleinen Seitenblick auf die Alt-/Neuwelt-Debatte:

And this biography’s final, awe-struck judgment on its unhappy subject is that he was “without question the greatest laboring-class poet England ever gave birth to.“ Here in the New World, we’re less astonished by the existence of unschooled, “laboring-class“ poets, although we tend to encounter them on discs rather than on the printed page. Clare’s work might be understood best, in fact, by those who can hear in it the sort of deceptively simple music we know from the likes of A. P. Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Skip James, Robert Johnson and Johnny Cash, all of them in thrall to their rural muse. Clare was, at heart, a ballad singer, the practitioner of a mournful and ecstatic art. One of his loveliest and most disconsolate poems, “Decay: A Ballad,“ is constructed around the refrain “O poesy is on the wane“ (he means his own, as well as the art in general); and the sentiment expressed there is exactly the one that animates Bob Dylan’s great elegy “Blind Willie McTell,“ whose refrain goes, “I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.“ There was a time, I think it’s fair to say, when no one sang the blues like mad John Clare.