My thesis examines social observation in the poetry of John Clare, focusing on his work in the years before he was committed to an asylum in 1837. The project illuminates a plurality of perspectives in his poetry that has not been fully recognized in previous critical studies. It resituates the conventional scholarly approach to Clare, which has been preoccupied by an overly oppositional conception of the ‘two cultures’ that he inhabited: the oral and the literary. My thesis positions him as an intellectually curious seeker whose poetry is invigorated by his experience of different value systems in both the country and the city. Each chapter considers how Clare develops different strategies of social observation in the context of different discourses, and how he unsettles the validity of various attitudes to human behaviour. Chapter One, ‘Naturalizing Perspectives’, offers a new approach to Clare’s interest in natural history, by examining its influence on his portrayal of human behaviour, when he adopts the detailed observational habits of the naturalist. Chapter Two, ‘Refined Perspectives’, shows how he negotiates the influences of poets who represented the social structure of rural life, and poets who were interested in rural subjectivity, in order to identify the distinctiveness of his presentation of customary culture in ‘The Village Minstrel’. Chapter Three, ‘Female Perspectives’, considers his interest in his female readership, and examines how his courtship tales – which have generally been neglected by critics – engage with the concerns about conduct and social elevation that occupied the literature aimed for this audience. Chapter Four, ‘National Perspectives’, examines how he responds to the ferment of political ideas in his time through his representations of the nation – another area that has been little served in critical studies. My Conclusion considers Clare’s later poetry in the asylum and his developing self-consciousness as a social observer.

The late eighteenth century marks an era where authors began forging identities that rebuffed the influences of the local communities to which they belonged. As literacy increased, so too did the notion of individuality, as members of the middle and lower orders soon saw themselves as separate, independent beings. The crowd, of course, helped simplify the management of complex emotions like anger through mutual demonstration; the greater number of participants in a protest, the more fitting the sense of indignation seemed to be. For cases of personal anger, however, the suitability and expression of the emotion were problematic, especially for those marginalized by gender, status, and political affiliations. While polite society deemed their anger unwarranted, odious, and threatening, subaltern authors simultaneously realized that the continued denial of the passion would cripple individual and artistic development, but excessive expression would yield further ridicule and ostracism. Anger, therefore, stimulated these authors to discover their actual worth as artists and individuals and carve unique identities that completely disregarded the restrictive characterizations assigned by a hierarchical society. Nevertheless, anger’s volatility meant that discovering oneself from a passion commonly represented as a moment “when we are not ourselves” was a particularly precarious endeavor since righteous indignation could quickly ignite into a mindless, destructive rage. Subaltern authors needed to authenticate the legitimacy of their anger to not only a largely unsympathetic audience, but also themselves, and the apparent foreignness of rage created confusion over the passion’s exact relation to the individual; anger is frequently emblematized in contradictions—internal vs. external, activity vs. passivity, sanity vs. insanity, reality vs. fantasy—to emphasize its deceptive fluidity. As this study argues, anger was fundamental to marginalized figures in achieving selfhood, but the passion’s overall instability and the objection by hierarchical society encouraged a literary treatment that was cautious, unique, and at times, clandestine.

This study addresses lesser known works of romantic poets John Clare and John Keats--Clare's Child Harold and Keats's poems to Fanny Brawne--which I refer to as their love poems because the works are informed by intense feelings the poets had for women they loved. Although these works have been the brunt of negative criticism because Clare was considered insane at the time of the composition of Child Harold and Keats was accused of using the poems to give vent to his personal sufferings, nonetheless I argue that the love poems are significant for several reasons. They are a reflection of the poets' personal experiences and also demonstrate their remarkable and surprisingly similar creative abilities in the way they use poetry as a means of devising new strategies for dealing with the painful realities of their disturbing lives. And because I feel it is important to understand Clare's and Keats's feelings for the women they love in order to understand their poetry (since the poetry is, after all, based on real life experiences), I provide chapters describing the poets's lives and loves, as well as their poetic processes, to serve as a framework for examining the poems. In the remaining chapters, I show how the poets incorporate highly sophisticated metaphor in attempting to reconcile the apparent conflicts the speakers in their poems are experiencing between their subjective responses to, and their rational assessment of human existence. In the process, the speakers experience various states of emotional upheaval ranging from what I refer to as periods of limbo, purgatory, and paradise, and they create personal thresholds and undergo differing states of self-awareness. In the final chapter I provide a summary of how these different emotional states are metaphorically effected, and then attempt to explain the value of Clare's and Keats's poetic achievements in the poems from a current perspective.

This thesis is the first sustained study of the poet John Clare and his relationship to health. It considers health as an under-explored physical and mental state evoked across his poetry and prose that has heretofore been overshadowed by a critical preoccupation with his supposed madness. Under the banner of the Medical Humanities, I angle a critical lens on Clare and health beyond biographical readings of his mental deterioration and onto his written responses to the medical, cultural, and social understandings of health by which he was surrounded. Specifically, I argue that Clare articulates both his comprehension and also experience of health through poetic form. I take a thematic approach to the reach of Clare's works composed between 1804-1864, and focus on what I argue to be the most predominant 'forms' that health takes across his poetics: voice, breath, and place. The chapters unfold the poet's engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical contexts such as nosology and theories of insanity, speech and elocution, climatic and atmospheric medicine, phrenology, and botany, in order to consider how the local formal techniques of his poems (metre and prosody, rhyme and other sonic devices, caesura, enjambment, and line-endings) shape and re-work the ideas of mental and physical health that these contexts put forward. Throughout the thesis I bring together formal and historical methodologies with modern phenomenological and cultural theories in order to draw out how Clare's exploration of health is both facilitated by the thinking of his own period, and also speaks to current research into health and illness as subjective experiences. Ultimately, I read health across Clare's poetry at the level of form in order to reveal how health inspires a textual mode that defies determinacy and unsettles distinctions between the healthy and the pathological. This thesis is the first sustained study of the poet John Clare and his relationship to health. It considers health as an under-explored physical and mental state evoked across his poetry and prose that has heretofore been overshadowed by a critical preoccupation with his supposed madness. Under the banner of the Medical Humanities, I angle a critical lens on Clare and health beyond biographical readings of his mental deterioration and onto his written responses to the medical, cultural, and social understandings of health by which he was surrounded. Specifically, I argue that Clare articulates both his comprehension and also experience of health through poetic form. I take a thematic approach to the reach of Clare's works composed between 1804-1864, and focus on what I argue to be the most predominant 'forms' that health takes across his poetics: voice, breath, and place. The chapters unfold the poet's engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical contexts such as nosology and theories of insanity, speech and elocution, climatic and atmospheric medicine, phrenology, and botany, in order to consider how the local formal techniques of his poems (metre and prosody, rhyme and other sonic devices, caesura, enjambment, and line-endings) shape and re-work the ideas of mental and physical health that these contexts put forward. Throughout the thesis I bring together formal and historical methodologies with modern phenomenological and cultural theories in order to draw out how Clare's exploration of health is both facilitated by the thinking of his own period, and also speaks to current research into health and illness as subjective experiences. Ultimately, I read health across Clare's poetry at the level of form in order to reveal how health inspires a textual mode that defies determinacy and unsettles distinctions between the healthy and the pathological.

Representations of the Gypsies and their lifestyle were widespread in British culture in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis analyzes the varying literary and artistic responses to the Gypsy figure in the period circa 1780-1870. Addressing not only well-known works by William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, John Clare, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot, but also lesser-known or neglected works by Gilbert White, Hannah More, George Crabbe and Samuel Rogers, unpublished archival material from Princess Victoria's journals, and a range of articles from the periodical press, this thesis examines how the figure of the Gypsy was used to explore differing conceptions of the landscape, identity and freedom, as well as the authoritative discourses of law, religion and science. The influence of William Cowper's Gypsy episode in Book One of The Task is shown to be profound, and its effect on ensuing literary representations of the Gypsy is an example of my interpretation of Wim Willem's term ‘paper Gypsies': the idea that literary Gypsies are often textual (re)constructions of other writers' work, creating a shared literary, cultural and artistic heritage. A focus on the picturesque and the Gypsies' role within that genre is a strong theme throughout this thesis. The ambiguity of picturesque Gypsy representations challenges the authority of the leisured viewer, provoking complex responses that either seek to contain the Gypsy's disruptive potential or demonstrate the figure's refusal to be controlled. An examination of texts alongside contemporary paintings and sketches of Gypsies by Princess Victoria, George Morland, Thomas Gainsborough, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable and John Everett Millais, elucidates the significance of the Gypsies as ambiguous ciphers in both literature and art.