This paper aims to elucidate the brotherhood between John Clare and John Keats and their poetics of eroticism by focusing on their poetical works dedicated to autumn. Throughout his life, Clare wrote about autumn with images corresponding to those in Keats’s ode, “To Autumn.” For instance, a sonnet entitled “To Autumn” is included in Clare’s second collection of poems published in 1821, The Village Minstrel, with “To the Memory of Keats,” a sonnet composed on Keats’s death. The Rural Muse, Clare’s final collection published in 1835, also contains a descriptive poem entitled “Autumn.” John Middleton Murry stated that “the most perfect poem of each [Clare and Keats] is an Ode to Autumn,” and these two autumn poems of Clare remarkably echo Keats’s ode. Although they never met, Clare’s letters to his editor John Taylor express an ardent attachment to Keats as his brother poet and grief over his early death. From the beginning of his poetic career, Clare was obsessed or even fascinated with the idea of the poet’s death and inclined to identify himself with Keats.
Besides Clare’s early works on autumn, a main interest of this paper lies in reading them in conjunction with unpublished prose works of his later years. The manuscripts in Northampton Central Library suggest that the prose writing entitled “Autumn” was composed during the short period of Clare’s stay in Northborough in 1841 between his escape from High Beach Asylum and his admission to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. An examination of the prose “Autumn” in comparison with his early poems on autumn illustrates the persisting influence of Keats on Clare until the end of his poetic life. This is also an attempt to illuminate how Clare’s sense of death and life developed into his sense of beauty in agony, or what might be called the poetics of eroticism.
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