SOURCE: “Writing Misreadings: Clare and the Real World,” in The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, edited by John Goodridge, The John Clare Society and The Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994, pp. 125-38.

In the following essay, Chirico argues that Clare's poetry is “informed by a complex and continuing theme: that of the troubled and unresolved relationship between precise, yet diverse and constantly changing, natural observations and their fixed and limited representation in poetry and memory.”

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In a thoughtful and perhaps long overdue article, ‘The Complexity of John Clare’—recently published in John Clare: A Bicentenary Celebration—Kelsey Thornton, while still (rightly) referring to John Barrell's The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place as ‘the best piece of writing about Clare’, takes issue with some major points in Barrell's argument, principally his reluctance to acknowledge Clare's use of symbolism. My own position certainly owes...