The Rural Muse: Poems

John Clare. The Rural Muse: Poems (1835). Kessinger Publishing, 2007. Paperback 175 pages. ISBN 0548704244. The present book is a facsimile reprint of the original edition of 'The Rural Muse' of 1835 and I have given it 5 stars for its historic importance. But what we need to understand is that the poems as printed here are not the poems as they left Clare's hand. From a much larger manuscript of 391 poems, 'The Midsummer Cushion', for which he hadn't been able to find enough subscribers, Clare, in 1834, sent a selection of 130 of its poems to his friend Mrs Eliza Emmerson in London. As anyone who has read anything about Clare knows, he paid very little attention to grammar, spelling, or punctuation, and to ready his raw text for 'polite' readers of the time it required considerable tidying-up. To be publishable at all the text had to be brought into line with the taste, prejudices, and expectations of an early 19th century audience. Mrs Emmerson, therefore, and with the best of intentions, dutifully tidied up Clare's raw text and it was her revised version, with many of her own emendations and with her heavy punctuation, that appeared in 1835 as 'The Rural Muse.' Unfortunately, Clare is not improved by regularization. It's true that when regularized, Clare's text becomes smoother and easier to read. His raw text, on the other hand, does slow us down and is at times difficult to read because it can present us with alternative readings depending upon where we decide to pause. But this is what makes it so interesting. Rather than being merely passive readers we become active and, in a sense, co-creators of the poem. And the very roughness of the raw text has a special flavor which is lost when the text is regularized and Clare is made to look and sound like everyone else. Happily, an unregularized modern edition of The Rural Muse: Poems edited by R.K.R. Thornton was published in the UK by the Carcanet Press, Mid Northumberland Arts Group, in 1982. Those who would like an unregularized edition of 'The Midsummer Cushion' are referred to: The Midsummer Cushion (Fyfield Books) which was published by Carcanet Press in 1990. These two books give us the texts of the poems as they are found in Clare's own manuscripts and minus the well-meant tampering of his contemporary editors. The raw texts do present a few minor difficulties at first, but these are soon overcome and readers will find that Clare's own versions provide a much more interesting reading experience than do those of his editors.