(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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lawyer politician Lord Chancellor
FitzGibbon was born c. 1749 near Donnybrook, Dublin, the son of John FitzGibbon of Ballysheedy, County Limerick and his wife Isabella Grove, daughter of John Grove, of Ballyhimmock, County Cork. His father had been born a Catholic but converted to the state religion in order to become a lawyer, and amassed a large fortune.
He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was highly distinguished as a classical scholar, and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1770.
In his teens Clare did hard labor, much of it connected with enclosure the fencing and hedging of common pasture land that over several centuries transformed the English countryside into something less free and more restricted by property rights.
Two years later he acquired a copy of a long and well-known nature poem cycle, James Thomson's The Seasons of 1730.
Clare worked as a gardener at Burghley house beginning around 1807, dodging his supervisors as he read and wrote poetry on the sly.
Clare's material circumstances did not improve during this period.
In the town of Stamford he met a bookstore owner named Edward Drury and a local editor, Octavius Gilchrist.
In 1820, Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery.
The billing was an astute one, for the modern fascination middle-class audiences have for "roots" cultures is traceable to the early 19th century.
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery sold more than 3, 000 copies in its first year, an astounding total for an unknown poet, and it was soon reprinted three times.
Clare traveled to London and for the first time he encountered famous creative artists.
Clare acquired several noble patrons who would later stick with him through difficult times.
He quickly followed up his first book with The Village Minstrel and Other Poems, published in 1821.
It was well received but did not become the sensation of the moment as his first book had. Through the 1826, Clare worked energetically on a variety of projects, most of which were never published.
They are notable for their variety and their sheer quantity; Clare's lifetime output, even as he spent half his adult life in institutions, ran to thousands of pages.
Clare also started a book called A Natural History of Helpstone and wrote a long satirical poem, The Parish, which cast a critical eye on small-town life.
He began collecting the songs of ballad singers in the Helpston area, making him one of the very first close observers of what would now be known as folk music.
He often referred to traditional ballads or even adapted their words in his poetry.
Since so much of Clare's work was never published, modern editors have wrestled with the question of whether to standardize his writing when readying it for inclusion in new collections. One Clare book that was published was The Shepherd's Calendar; with Village Stories and Other Poems, in 1827.
A cottage and a small plot of land on an estate in nearby Northborough, provided in 1832 by one of Clare's aristocratic admirers, gave him a temporary fresh start.
Soon, however, Clare's difficulties returned.
His new farm was undercapitalized, and expenditures kept pace with or exceeded income.
Orders for Clare's new book lagged, and it was finally published in 1835, after what Hugh Haughton and Adam Phillips in John Clare in Context called "mutually soul-destroying negotiations" with John Taylor, as The Rural Muse, in a heavily cut form. Clare complained of writer's block and memory loss, and friends who visited him were disturbed to find him muttering incoherently.
In 1837 Taylor led an intervention in which Clare was taken to the High Beech Asylum, a progressive institution that bore little resemblance to the hellholes to which the mentally ill were usually consigned.
Clare had free run of the grounds and surrounding woods, and was able to write.
Some argued that Clare was not mentally ill at all.
It is also significant that Clare's poetry, although he wrote less while institutionalized, showed no decline in creativity.
One of his most often anthologized poems, "I Am, " dated from 1841, the last year of his first term in the asylum.
In the summer of that year, Clare escaped from the asylum and walked the approximately one hundred miles to Northborough, recording his experiences in a manuscript titled Journey Out of Essex.
He spent about five months with his family and was then taken to the Northamptonshire General Lunatic Asylum, where he spent the rest of his life.
Before his death, however, he wrote another famous poem, the quizzical "To John Clare. "Clare's poetry exerted an increasing fascination as the 20th century went on, especially as society in general began to wrestle with the nature of mental illness.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
He especially distrusted the priests, and many years later explained that his life-long resistance to all concession to the Catholics was based on his " unalterable opinion " that " a conscientious Popish ecclesiastic never will become a well- attached subject to a Protestant state, and that the Popish clergy must always have a commanding influence on every member of that communion. "
The Catholic Relief Bill of 1793 was forced on the Irish executive by the cabinet in London, but it passed rapidly and easily through the Irish parliament.
On the 10th of February 1800 Clare in the House of Lords moved the resolution approving the union in a long and powerful speech, in which he reviewed the history of Ireland since the Revolution, attributing the evils of recent years to the independent constitution of 1782, and speaking of Grattan in language of deep personal hatred.
Quotations:
"The poem, he said (as quoted on the John Clare Page website), made his heart "twitter with joy. "
"I am: yet what I am none cares or knows, " Clare wrote.
"My friends forsake me like a memory lost; I am the self-consumer of my woes. "
Clare complained bitterly about his incarceration, and one often-quoted visitor (as for example by Haughton and Phillips) recorded that he said "they have cut off my head, and picked out all the letters of the alphabet all the vowels and consonants and brought them out through my ears; and then they want me to write poetry! I can't do it. "
In 1778 he entered the Irish House 01 Commons as member for Dublin University, and at first gave a general support to the popular party led by Henry Grattan.
He was a memeber of Parliamenfor Kilmallock
Clare advocated stringent measures to prevent an outbreak; but he was neither cruel nor immoderate, and was inclined to mercy in dealing with individuals.
He was, however, arrogant, overbearing and intolerant to the last degree.
Modern observers have disagreed as to the precise nature of Clare's illness; speculation about schizophrenia gave way to those involving more contemporary maladies.
He rarely used punctuation, paid little attention to spelling, and used verbal patterns drawn from the local Northamptonshire dialect.
Quotes from others about the person
Most important of all, Merrin argued, was the semi-oral nature of Clare's poetry in a time when spoken poetry, thanks to hip-hop music and poetry slams, was on the rise.
Clare, who grew up in a household with a father who could barely read and a mother who was illiterate, was a powerful user of the English language but one who was never comfortable with its grammatical conventions.
Two of Clare's three siblings, including a twin sister, died in infancy, and Clare grew up in grinding rural poverty.
Clare tried out his poems on his parents, at first claiming that they had been written by someone else but gradually gaining confidence.
Clare was also interested in the music of the gypsy or Romany people who moved through the area. Indeed, Clare's father was a reasonably good tavern singer, and Clare felt close to musicians who passed down their songs by ear rather than writing them down.
That book, a sort of country calendar with poems, sold only 400 copies, which spelled financial trouble for Clare since he and his wife by that time had seven children.
His wife, in compliance with his death-bed request, destroyed all his papers.
Baron FitzGibbon, of Lower Connello in the County of Limerick, in the Peerage of Ireland on appointment as Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1789, Viscount FitzGibbon, of Limerick in the County of Limerick, in the Peerage of Ireland in 1793, Earl of Clare in the Peerage of Ireland in 1795. Baron FitzGibbon, of Sidbury in the County of Devon, in the Peerage of Great Britain, in 1799.
