John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864), BBC Radio 4, with Melvyn Bragg and Guests

Programme details:, In Our Time, John Clare

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Northamptonshire poet John Clare who, according to one of Melvyn's guests Jonathan Bate, was 'the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced'. Clare worked in a tavern, as a gardener and as a farm labourer in the early 19th century and achieved his first literary success with Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. He was praised for his descriptions of rural England and his childhood there, and his reaction to the changes he saw in the Agricultural Revolution with its enclosures, displacement and altered, disrupted landscape. Despite poor mental health and, from middle age onwards, many years in asylums, John Clare continued to write and he is now seen as one of the great poets of his age".

With

Sir Jonathan Bate
Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford

Mina Gorji
Senior Lecturer in the English Faculty and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge

and

Simon Kövesi
Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University

Producer: Simon Tillotson.