Another Green World: John Clare’s Employment of Pastoral

This lecture is drawn from my recent book Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community (Stanford, 2024). The link to the book can be found here: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=37417 

My talk will explore some aesthetic and socio-economic paradigms and paradoxes in the work of John Clare, the so-called “peasant poet” of British Romanticism. Looking carefully at Clare’s position vis-à-vis enclosure -- where Clare was a victim dispossessed by enclosure’s privatization of common land, but also worked wage labor constructing the infrastructure of enclosure -- I’ll take up questions of labor, literary form, and the nonhuman world. A close reading of his poem “Pastoral Poesy” will give us a rich site to think through, as Clare lays out his remarkably complex and ecologically sensitive theory of poetry and poetic language, which he relates to “a language that is ever green.” Ultimately, Clare will help us pose the question of how reading well might be related to living well in common. 

Joseph Albernaz is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He specializes in the literature, especially poetry, of the Romantic period, with a particular interest in the legacies of Romanticism across a number of theoretical and critical domains. Joe was selected as the Harold Stirling Vanderbilt lecturer at Vanderbilt University in Fall 2023.