Repetition and Clare s Lyric of Withdrawn Revelation-

ELH 82.2 (2015): 637–69

The present essay examines how the extraordinarily itinerant lyric “I” of the late Romantic poet John Clare constitutes a historical revision of the critical narratives of lyric containment and immediacy that consolidated from Victorian era onward and have recently been contested by lyric theorists of address, apostrophe, and history. Yet because Clare’s poetry critiques a particular historical moment when Britain saw itself as an enclosed island of enclosed estates, his work presents speakers whose irrepressible, traveling energies are not easily defined by any of today’s current theories of lyric. Clare’s revisionary “I”s stem from his sense that he had become as displaced, forgotten, and superseded as the unenclosed common greens of his childhood. Yet Clare’s alienation from the present moment of his writing also results from the neglect of his peasant poetry and his emotional sufferings as a semi-literate subject who experienced mental illness and was committed to an asylum. Together, these intense struggles against the historical, poetic, and personal pressures of enclosure positioned his work as out of sync with the chronologies and concerns of modernity. Clare transforms the poetic “I” into a haunting anachronism, an untimely vehicle that equally unsettles our ideas about lyric enclosure, apostrophe, and address.

Journal of Literary Theory, 2015

Sometime around 1900, a fundamental shift occurred in the way animals were represented in works of Western literature, art, and philosophy. Authors began to write about animals in a way that was unheard-of or even unimaginable in previous epochs. Traditionally, animals had fulfilled a symbolic, allegorical, or satirical function. But in the period around the turn of the twentieth century these animals begin, as it were, to »misbehave« or to »resist« the metaphorical values attributed to them. There is a conspicuous abundance of animals in the literature of this period, and this animal presence is frequently characterised by a profound and troubling ambiguity, which is often more or less explicitly linked to the problem of writing, representation, and language – specifically poetic or metaphorical language.Taking the Austrian literary scholar Oskar Walzel’s 1918 essay »Neue Dichtung vom Tiere« as its starting point, this essay explores the historical and philosophicalbackground of this paradigm shift as well as its implications for the study of animals in literature more generally. Zoopoetics is both an object of study in its own right and a specific methodological and disciplinary problem for literary animal studies: what can the study of animals can contribute to literary studies and vice versa? What can literary animal studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might otherwise be blind to? Although animals abound in the literature of almost every geographical area and historical period, traditional literary criticism has been marked by the tendency to disregard this ubiquitous animal presence in literary texts, or else a single-minded determination to read animals exclusively as metaphors and symbols for something else, in short as »animal imagery«, which, as Margot Norris writes, »presupposes the use of the concrete to express the abstract, and indeed, it seem[s] that nowhere in literature [are] animals to be allowed to be themselves« (Norris 1985, 17). But what does it mean for literary theory and criticism to allow animals to »be themselves«? Is it possible to resist the tendency to press animals »into symbolic service« (ibid.) as metaphors and allegories for the human, whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal?The pervasive uneasiness regarding the metaphorical conception of the animal within recent scholarship in animal studies stems from a more general suspicion that such a conception serves ultimately to assimilate the animal to a fundamentally logocentric discourse and hence to reduce »animal problems to a principle that functions within the legibility of the animal: from animal to aniword« (Burt 2006, 166). The question of the animal thus turns out to have been thequestion of language all along. Conversely, however, we might also posit that thequestion of language has itself also always been the question of the animal. Whatwould it mean for literary studies if we were to take the implications of thisinvolution seriously? How can we be attentive to the specific way animals operatein literary texts as »functions of their literariness« (McHugh 2009, 490)? In otherwords, not merely as one trope in an author’s poetic arsenal that could easily bereplaced by any other, but rather as a specific problem to and for language andrepresentation as such.

Studies in Romanticism, 1994

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary.

2010

This thesis examines the works of several prominent poets that span over three centuries, through various histories and cultures. These poets have attempted to reconsider reified or ossified concepts of 'self' either consciously or unconsciously and have, thereby, created innovative ways of expressing received notions of subjectivity and of 'self'. Several things have stood out in this research as a result of tackling the thesis question. The Writer (writ large) is situated in a physiological, geographical, weathered place where wind, stone, falling, sitting, smiling, howling, bleeding have always been, and will always be, the basic stuff of poetry. The notion of a fixed, empirical self is an anachronism based on cultural constructs and milieus, whereas the Writer / poet is in fact a differentiated being who accesses a range of selves derived from arenas such as a Lacanian 'second self' ; physiology; cultural structuring; or a host of other prevaricating factors including historical and political forces. The Writer, in short, is not always who we think we see, know or experience and is not always that singular individual at every moment or location in time. Finally, this impermanent, plural, 'malleable' writer / self is situated in specific contexts and remains in a constant tension or negotiation with the ubiquitous symbols of world-time. The 'new' in the writer's works is made possible through how the Writer attempts to make sense of their experience and in the creative ways they articulate those experiences and symbols. Each poet has approached the notion of the 'I' in such similar, yet variegated, ways that an inter-textural analysis is invited and therefore the exegesis is delivered in a syncretised format rather than in sections.

Comparative Literature Studies, 2005

International Journal of Research - GRANTHAALAYAH, 2022

APA Cite: - Quadri, K. M., Yadav, M., Yadav, M. (2022). Aspects of Linguistic Usage in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. International Journal of Research - GRANTHAALAYAH, 10(12), 44–54. doi: 10.29121/granthaalayah.v10.i12.2022.4948 Poetic language includes three key components: sound, shape, and sense. However, every poem has its own context and is an intertext with other poems. Therefore, the substantial use of alliteration, rhyming, lyrical expression, and clichés, as well as other language devices that bring attention to words, sounds, or other device decorations, is a necessary tool and trick in the scientific production of poetry. This article explored to inspect the aspects of linguistic usage in the forms of semantics that are accomplished in the poetic and figurative language of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which aimed to examine the influence of lexical knowledge in language and literature and how it enhances inventiveness. Even though this poem speaks of ordinary people, and an expression of sympathy and support for those who have the misfortune to be without money or social prestige in the literary sense. The involvement of syntactic-semantic factors, viz., presupposition and entailment, make the poem more vivid to the reader. Furthermore, the poem Elegy contains hyponyms and synonyms, accompanied by a semantic echo. This study focuses on lexical relations included in the poem through syntagmatic and paradigmatic word descriptions. Further, this study examines those ambiguous words that generate complexity between the speaker/writer and their listener/reader. It has been discovered that various aspects of semantics form a nexus between the theme and word formation in poetry.

Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies, eds. Simon Kovesi and Erin Lafford (2020): 221-47, 2020

‘Common Distress’ analyses the visionary connections that John Clare drew between the ostensibly separate physical, formal, pecuniary, and meteorological dimensions of stress and strain. Primarily considering Clare’s first two published volumes, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel and Other Poems (1821), my research explores the connections between harmony and harm as they specifically apply to the tradition of the distressed poet, Clare’s biographical circumstances, and the time of general distress defined by the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, the effects of the Corn Laws, and the return to the gold standard. In ‘The Poets Wish’, for example, Clare’s poetics of distress encompasses lyric and labour: ‘Invok’d the muse & scrig’d a strain’. To be sure, in the wake of the Age of Sensibility, Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (‘The Eeolian Harp’) represented the body as a lyric instrument whose vibrating nervous fibres could be agitated, soothed, or tuned. Yet Clare’s experiments with poetic stress move beyond representations of the speaker’s body as a working instrument. Far from anomalous, the strains of the distressed poet envision birds, atmospheres, shepherds, and bards as simultaneously under pressure. Taken together, Clare’s first two volumes imagine a new, radically inclusive poetic concept of community defined by common distress.

1. Introduction John Clarewas no doubt a poet of peasant and rustic originality. Every work belonging to him is no doubt a matter of sensibility of natural but enthusiastic thoughts that have been greatly appreciated by the poetic world of modern literature. His moods and temperaments are deeply associated with the very nature of rustic and the surroundings of peasant lives in which he locally lived since his birth. Born towards the dawn of the Romantic Period (13 th July 1793), he has a strong sense of natural subjectivism that is strongly assimilated with the very tone of melancholic undertone. Personal dissatisfaction with social life, love life and the misfortunes of hopes and aspiration led him to pen with the thoughts of desolation and dejection. He talks about the changing role of the society that is veiled to the very essence of systematic development of the thoughts and moods of the 18 th society of England. His personal life was very much disturbed with the pangs of money and was constantly torn between the two genres of literary London and most often with his illiterate neighbours. His last work, the Rural Muse(1835) was much noticed and appreciated by Christopher North and few others reviewers but was unable to rapport his whole family well. His behavior even more became erratic after his excessive clinked with alcohol. He is known as the peasant poet of Northhamptoshire. Born a year after Shelley and two years before Keats, Clare belonged to the legendary generation which is the magnitude of greatest poetic sensibility of literary world. If we penetrate his personal life we will, being a citizen of post modernism, be ashamed with the notion and view of his entire life. Although he was the son of illiterate parents, Clare received little knowledge of schooling. While earning money by doing some laborious works such as ploughing and threshing in the field, he has reached the culminating point of supreme value by procreating major and the ever youth greatest poems such as " Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. After having been suffered from delusions, Clare was pathetically admitted to the mental asylum where he spent the final 20 years of his life. Besides that having two wives in his personal and conjugal life didn't lead him to the path of merriment and joy. His poetical sketches and outcomes of his thoughts clearly corroborate the extreme truth of the exigencies of his life. During his life, Clare observed a period of massive changes in between town and countryside. The Agriculture Revolution, The Enclosures saw the pastures ploughed up, trees and hedges uprooted, tract of wet lands drained and the common land used for plough enclosed. These kind of massive destruction affected and distressed Clare deeply. Large numbers of farmers and agricultural labourers, during his time, went to the new industrial factories in search of foods and clothing in order to escape themselves from the tyranny of landlords. Social hierarchy and misjudgments are the deepest core of his poetry. In his early life he struggled to find a place for his poetry and encountered so much lamentations which he depicted in his personal thoughts. His early work heightens both in nature and the duration of the rural year. poems such as " Haymaking " , " Wood Pictures in Summer " , " Winter Making " are of the celebration of the beauty of the world and the certainties of the rural life associated with the