Old Songs & Ballads (Ch. 28)

The best way to appreciate Clare is to approach him as ‘the Poet of Popular Culture’.  His strengths are in his intense sense of locality, his fight to fend off standardization, and his determination to express himself in the language and the concerns of his own background.  Much of his material can be traced back to medieval sources transmitted over the centuries through broadsides, chapbooks, newspapers and word-of-mouth.  Fairy-stories, children’s games, popular superstitions, proverbs, epitaphs, tall tales, folk dance, folk melody, rural protest, rural conservatism, traditional weather signs, country customs and ceremonies are all celebrated in his writings.  An excellent example of this tradition is found in Clare’s prose piece ‘Early Morning Ploughboy’ :

I thought I was up sooner than usual & before morning was on the stir out of doors     but I am pleasantly disappointed by the whistle of the ploughboy past the window making himself merry & trying to make the dull weather dance to a very pleasant tune which I know well & yet cannot recollect the song      but there are hundreds of these pleasant tunes familiar to the plough & the splashing stream & the little fields of spring that have lain out the brown rest of winter & grew into mirth with the sprouting grain    the cheep of the sky lark    & the old songs & ballads that even accompany field happiness in following the plough -- by neither head known   or noticed by all the world beside           

(Pet MS B6 p99)

As Clare himself declares in his final prophetic words, he has earned insufficient attention even from the historians of popular culture.

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