SOURCE: “Pastoral and Popular Modes in Clare's Enclosure Elegies,” in The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-taught Tradition, The John Clare Society, 1994, pp. 139-55.

In the following essay, Goodridge examines John Clare's use of a variety of popular and literary traditions in what have become known as his “enclosure elegies.”

I want to look at a group of poems that seem to me to epitomise Clare's ‘Independent Spirit’ as a self-taught poet: they have long been known, considered and admired (by radical critics, at least) as a group, but it took Johanne Clare, in her fine study John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance, to give them a name that would stick: the enclosure elegies.

My interest in them is the way that Clare draws together popular and literary materials in their construction, especially the way he draws on rather unpromising material such as scripture, or pastoral...