Clare the Green Hero/Victim

In the study of literature and the environment (ecocriticism) John Clare has become an archetype of the environmentally progressive citizen and victim. It's as if he were being made contemporary witness to the planet's environmental crisis, with its daunting stakes. He is the troubled hero of numerous twentieth- and twenty-first-century poems, dramas and novels, and is claimed to allow ‘an awkward but authentic vision of what kinds of dwelling may be possible for humankind in a postindustrial landscape’.

My focus is the contemporary cultural usage of Clare in criticism. Eagerness to co-opt Clare to contemporary green politics has led to some simplification. His texts at times become a vehicle for environmental truisms evasive of our own dauntingly complex context, known by the nickname, the ‘Anthropocene’. If, as climate scientist Kimberly Nicholas says, the 2020s are ‘the decade that will define the future for both humanity and life on Earth’, it is surely important that Clare's relevance is not celebrated in simplifying terms that evade the deeper, more insidious context of our times.

Let us first acknowledge why Clare seems so contemporary. His image has crystallised around those poems, published and unpublished, protesting the loss of commons-right land to the ‘enclosures’, which reserved land to private and exclusive use.