Other Traditions

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• What is it about Clare that attracts us so much today? I have already alluded to one aspect of him that strikes one almost at the first moment of contact, that is, for want of a more exact term, his seeming modernity. Arthur Symons, who wrote the first valuable twentieth-century essay on Clare, an introduction to a collection of his poems published in 1908, said of him, “he begins anywhere and stops anywhere.” ...... Yes, Clare often starts up for no reason, like a beetle thrashing around in a weed patch, and stops as suddenly; yes, his sonnets haven’t the shapeliness of real sonnets, his longer poems the graceful expensiveness of the odes of William Collins which he so admired, but to our ears they capture the rhythms of nature, its vagaries and messiness, in a way that even Keats neve... (查看原文)

  边亭 2020-03-20 16:01:11

• Another side of Clare’s modernity is a kind of nakedness of vision that we are accustomed to, at least in America, from the time of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, down to Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. ...... It is like that “instant intimacy” for which we Americans are so notorious in foreign climes. Clare bears you no ill will and doesn’t want to shock or pain you, but that isn’t going to make him change his tale one whit; if you suddenly burst into tears, that will seem to him another natural phenomenon, like the rain or the squeal of a badger. He is apt to show you his wounds and crack a joke in the same moment; he is above all an instrument of telling. (查看原文)

  边亭 2020-03-20 16:01:11

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