SOURCE: “‘A language that is ever green’: The Ecological Vision of John Clare,” in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 2, Winter, 1991, pp. 226-49.

In the following essay, McKusick explores Clare's ecological consciousness. singling the poet out for his sensitivity toward nature and his vehement support for environmental preservation, and calling his oeuvre “a powerful and suggestive model for contemporary ecological writing.”

John Clare described himself on the title page of his first collection of poems as a ‘Northamptonshire Peasant,’ a bold assertion of regional identity that situated his voice in an East Midland county that was becoming increasingly a zone of ecological conflict, marked by unequal struggle between the advocates of parliamentary enclosure and the forlorn adherents of the older, sustainable methods of open-field agriculture. The arguments advanced in favour of parliamentary enclosure during the early nineteenth century will sound familiar to late twentieth-century readers still subjected to...