The Shepherd's Calendar: Manuscript and Published Version

By John Clare

Book Overview

John Clare is one of the greatest English Romantic poets, and The Shepherd's Calendar is his masterpiece. It is a classic of English poetry and a fascinating work of social history, recording... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1857548914
• ISBN13: 9781857548914
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Carcanet Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 3.1" x 10.7"

Customer Reviews

Excellent editorial decisions

Unlike most traditional English pastoral poetry, Clare's Shepherd's Calendar goes much farther towards revealing country life as it was actually lived. He recounts the holidays and festivals, folk tales, various reactions to good and bad weather, and agricultural practices of the people of Helpston. The stanzas and rhyme schemes vary from poem to poem and Clare finds a way of presenting each month in a unique way. This is not some romanticized vision of country life, but a real engagement with its people and beautiful descriptions of the countryside and weather. This edition of Clare's Shepherd's Calendar is perhaps the first book ever to publish Clare's final written manuscripts and the actual text published during his lifetime on facing pages. There are other editions of The Shepherd's Calendar that have only one or the other, but I find that the inclusion of both makes this by far the best (and most convenient) edition. Chilcott's wonderful introductory essay makes a good argument for the worth of the original published text and finds a good middle ground between the rigid textual purism of some of today's Clare scholars and Taylor and Hessey's impulse to make the texts "presentable" at all costs. After all, for every quote you can produce in which Clare says he hates grammar and pesky editors, you can produce another in which he gladly agrees to edit his texts in order to make them more accessible to the public. Chilcott emphasizes that the editorial process, though long and drawn out, was always collaborative. Nobody slunk away with Clare's manuscripts and rewrote them behind his back. All in all, this is a great edition of Clare, both for the common reader and the scholar and the nice artwork makes it all the more pleasant. I wish similar editions of Clare's three other books and his scattered periodical publications would come out. Again, as with The Living Year 1841, Chilcott shows that he knows exactly what to do with Clare texts.