Essay About Farm Labourer And Early Work

Commonsense
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farm labourer with little formal education, John Clare had more
trouble with grammar than most poets. Asked to correct a passage to please
the literate audience he wrote for, he expressed his irritation:
I may alter but I cannot mend grammar
in learning is like
tyranny in government–confound the bitch Ill never be her
slave & have a vast good mind not to alter the verse in
question [. . .]. (Letters 133)
He once confessed, “Grammer I never read a page of in my Life”
(Autobiographical Writings 28). However, Clare was not writing a
general essay for a composition instructor: he had to please his audience to
make money, but he needed his regional speech to write poetry about his
experience even though some readers objected to it.â„- He was sorry one
early work did not “describe the feelings of a ryhming [sic] peasant strongly
or localy [sic] enough” (Autobiographical Writings 106), and John
Barrell argues that the long quotation above shows Clare rejecting an alien
educated dialect even where grammar rather than dialect vocabulary caused the
problem (128).
Miller 8
Note
â„- One modern critic who accepts dialect terms still prefers editions of Clare
that “correct” the spelling and capitalizing because, he feels, more accurate
texts “can result in a complacent response to Clares untutored rusticity (how
charming!