John Clare: Helpston's amanuensis
Item
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Title
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John Clare: Helpston's amanuensis
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:84fb379242bb:11957
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identifier
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12642
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Creator
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Derbyshire, Nancy Martin,
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Contributor
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Alan Vardy
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | Helpston | John Clare | Nature | Poetry | Prosopopoeia | Voice
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Abstract
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This dissertation elucidates the ways in which John Clare's relationship to his native environment impacts his poetic philosophy and practice. In order to take up this question, I establish how Clare's environmental engagements influence aspects of his poetic process, including his tasteful witnessing of sources, mimicry of and correspondence with sources, transcription of sources, and composition. I describe and theorize Clare's documentary poetics, which offers a viable way of interacting with nature by listening to, recording, and composing sound. I also identify some of the literary strategies Clare uses to give voice to nature, including the compositional method sono-loco-documentation. Lastly, I articulate Clare's "trifling" aesthetic sensibility in order to examine his strategic empowerment of rural obscurity, which seeks to establish original centers of poetic value and to demonstrate specific behaviors of critical appreciation.;As documentary catalogs of sounds and sights, Clare's poems model a poetic natural history over against Romantic genius. This external captivation revises traditional ideas about the Romantic poet. Clare's work of witness, documentation, and testimony presents a new aesthetic in which the speaker's subjectivity is elided or set aside as a function of broadcasting the voices within nature. This bottom-up (or outside-in) aesthetic advocates for the rights of the [enclosed] land, landless dwellers, nature's "trifles," and the "rhyming peasant.";Sound plays a marked role in Clare's identification with his environment. His innovation is to treat sound exchange literally in his poems and use it as a symbol of literary and artistic exchange and evaluation. Thus, his poetic process is characterized by a participatory relation that is auditory, egalitarian, and collaborative. His self-perceived task is to witness and transcribe nature's transmissions; he is Helpston's amanuensis. This framing trope produces an artificial effect (i.e., the absence of, or self-restraint by, a human bard), but it also allows for creative treatment of the loco-descriptive and pastoral modes according to new centers of lyrical value (e.g., rural labor, non-human lives, geographical locus, and aurality).;The personification of non-humans represents certain political and ecological attitudes, but Clare extends personhood because it is an effective literary stratagem that accentuates both individuals and the community of Helpston and because it creates a powerful and eccentric source of interest (which trades in pleasurable, copious sounds). The conceit of a vocal nature forges a compelling, basic, and unassailable symbol of the poet. When every thing sings, certainly we must listen.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
