SOURCE: '"Very copys of nature': John Clare's Descriptive Poetry", in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 1, January, 1974, pp. 84-99.

In the following excerpt, Todd argues that unlike the Romantic poets, who focused on humanity's spiritual response to nature, Clare described the pure or Edenic qualities of nature and the manner in which it falls victim to humanity's cruelty.

In the early nineteenth century, there were two main poetic modes of presenting nature. The first was developed from the Georgic poetry of the eighteenth century and provided close, usually visual descriptions of natural things, without any explicit judgment or emotional response by the poet; this type of poetry can be called descriptive. The second mode is a combination of idealized presentations of natural objects and the poet's response to them. His own judgment and emotion not only affect the natural presentation, but also become the partial or main subject of...