The recognition of John Clare as a poet, not a madman
CLARE, John Madrigals and Chronicles… Edited with a preface and Commentary by Edmund Blunden. London: The Beaumont Press. 1924.
8vo. Original oatmeal cloth backed paper covered boards decorated with flowers and leaves; pp. xii + 102 + [1], 3 photographic plates, illustrations by Randolph Schwabe; very good. Provenance: ffep inscribed by Edmund Blunden to Robert Cooper (1892-1972). Blunden's inscription of 17th January 1930 includes a transcription, made from memory, of Clare's last poem, which at this point had not been printed and would not be printed until John Tibble's 1935 edition of Clare's poetry: "'Tis Spring: warm glows the South;/ Chaffinch carries the moss in his mouth". Blunden was at the forefront of the revival of interest in Clare in the mid-twentieth century. Previously written off as a simple-minded lunatic, Clare was beginning to be recognised for the important nature poet and environmental visionary that he was.
No. 278 of 310 copies. This is a collection of recently found, previously unpublished poems by John Clare that were held by Peterborough Museum. The vision of the countryside that the poems reveal, where rural labourers and wildlife are at peace in a mid-England landscape that each calls home, are characteristic of Clare's output as a poet of deep environmental awareness.
#2120458