John Clare (1793–1864) has long been recognized as one of England's foremost poets of nature, landscape and rural life. Scholars and general readers alike regard his tremendous creative output as a testament to a probing and powerful intellect. Clare was that rare amalgam ‒ a poet who wrote from a working-class, impoverished background, who was steeped in folk and ballad culture, and who yet, against all social expectations and prejudices, read and wrote himself into a grand literary tradition. All the while he maintained a determined sense of his own commitments to the poor, to natural history and to the local. Through the diverse approaches of ten scholars, this collection shows how Clare's many angles of critical vision illuminate current understandings of environmental ethics, aesthetics, Romantic and Victorian literary history, and the nature of work.

'This fine collection of essays exemplifies, as the editors' note in their introduction, the 'striking variety' of Clare’s writings and the 'interpretive capaciousness' of this fertile moment in Clare scholarship … Ranging widely from Clare’s engagement with eighteenth-century verse to his reception in the years following his death, the contributors shed new light on some of his most characteristic forms and themes and on his complex place in the literary and political cultures of his day … ground-breaking and important not only for Clare scholarship but also for the study of nineteenth-century literature.'

Stephanie Kuduk Weiner Source: Modern Philology

'New Essays on John Clare marks a fresh departure in John Clare studies, and it will prove rewarding to Clare specialists and to generalist readers who seek to understand Clare’s place in the broader historical development of literary culture in the Romantic and Victorian periods.'

Jim McKusick Source: The Wordsworth Circle

'New Essays on John Clare serves as a new landmark collection that articulates the wonderfully diverse avenues for rereading Clare as a full participant in the nineteenth-century intellectual milieu of literature, art, and politics.'

Katey Castellano Source: Romanticism Journal

'Simon Kövesi’s and Scott McEathron’s collection represents an engaging and timely contribution to Clare studies, one most rewarding for the way it testifies to Clare’s ‘ongoing status as an uncategorizable literary and social misfit’.'

Daniel Westwood Source: The Keats-Shelley Review