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Clare's Empire

ebook

The seventh full-length collection of poems from Jordan Smith, the Edward E. Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College in Schenectady, New York, is a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare. Of his inspiration, Professor Smith writes: "Although it draws on Clare's writings and on the available biographies, it makes no pretense to biographical accuracy. Clare's poems interested me because of the combination of a natural sympathy, sometimes sentimental or conventional but often deeply felt especially for creatures or people on the margins, and a ferocity that arose both from the rigors of the natural world and from a sense of injustice at what humans do so readily to that world and to each other. Clare's life, a series of almost impossible negotiations between ignorance and knowledge, gift and condescension, poetry and privilege, appetite and refinement, seemed to me to raise issues that have hardly gone away: class, liberty, ecological responsibility, the rights of imagination and the rights of property. The intent of the poems is to present moments from that life at a high pitch of tension and to consider how little has changed."


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Publisher: The Hydroelectric Press

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781311631756
  • Release date: April 2, 2014

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9781311631756
  • File size: 247 KB
  • Release date: April 2, 2014

Formats

OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Fiction Poetry

Languages

English

The seventh full-length collection of poems from Jordan Smith, the Edward E. Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College in Schenectady, New York, is a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare. Of his inspiration, Professor Smith writes: "Although it draws on Clare's writings and on the available biographies, it makes no pretense to biographical accuracy. Clare's poems interested me because of the combination of a natural sympathy, sometimes sentimental or conventional but often deeply felt especially for creatures or people on the margins, and a ferocity that arose both from the rigors of the natural world and from a sense of injustice at what humans do so readily to that world and to each other. Clare's life, a series of almost impossible negotiations between ignorance and knowledge, gift and condescension, poetry and privilege, appetite and refinement, seemed to me to raise issues that have hardly gone away: class, liberty, ecological responsibility, the rights of imagination and the rights of property. The intent of the poems is to present moments from that life at a high pitch of tension and to consider how little has changed."


Expand title description text