
Contents
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‘neath the churchyard grass’: ‘The Village Minstrel’ ‘neath the churchyard grass’: ‘The Village Minstrel’
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‘resting places’: Clare’s Churchyard Lyric ‘resting places’: Clare’s Churchyard Lyric
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4 ‘All ploughd & buried now’: John Clare’s Mixed Genres and the Long Churchyard Poem
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Published:January 2025
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Abstract
Chapter 4 takes up another eighteenth-century genre, the long poem, to show how John Clare’s ‘The Village Minstrel’ (1821) combines georgic, pastoral, topographical poetry, and elegy as generic signatures brought into creative tension over the span of a poem charting the life of a rural poet named Lubin. As these genres generate a cross-hatched correspondence, looping back into new formations, the long poem accommodates other interlocking rhythms like the working day, the seasons, and the lives of rural labourers that find their close in the churchyard. For Clare, however, writing in the industrial intensification of the changes wrought by capital, the churchyard punctures his poetry’s patterns of time and becomes a disruptive centre of difficult feeling as these patterns are warped by agricultural ‘improvement’. The churchyard in Clare’s poem indexes social changes contorting the arc of this already arduous life of labour, as those buried there are hailed as strangers to their native landscape, rearranged by enclosure. Here, and in a series of shorter lyrics written across his career, Clare turns back to the churchyard and disinters evidence of the harms allotted to those compelled to work in the grip of a new era of the brutal reorganization of rural life and landscape.
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