Commonsense

farm labourer with little formal education, John Clare had more

trouble with grammar than most poets. Asked to correct a passage to please

the literate audience he wrote for, he expressed his irritation:

I may alter but I cannot mend grammar

in learning is like

tyranny in government--confound the bitch I'll never be her

slave & have a vast good mind not to alter the verse in

question [. . .]. (Letters 133)

He once confessed, "Grammer I never read a page of in my Life"

(Autobiographical Writings 28). However, Clare was not writing a

general essay for a composition instructor: he had to please his audience to

make money, but he needed his regional speech to write poetry about his

experience even though some readers objected to it.â„- He was sorry one

early work did not "describe the feelings of a ryhming [sic] peasant strongly

or localy [sic] enough" (Autobiographical Writings 106), and John

Barrell argues that the long quotation above shows Clare rejecting an alien

educated dialect even where grammar rather than dialect vocabulary caused the

problem (128).

Miller 8

Note

â„- One modern critic who accepts dialect terms still prefers editions of Clare

that "correct" the spelling and capitalizing because, he feels, more accurate

texts "can result in a complacent response to Clare's untutored rusticity (how

charming!