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In their poetry, Clare and Wordsworth both treat the abundant pleasures of childhood ‘spots’ of ‘joy’ and ‘joys’. But they also view the passing of childhood as intensely troubling. Yet whileWordsworth contemplates the memory of childhood and the perplexing experiences of that period of life, he often sees it in terms of a wider process of individual, poetic development and
growth, whereas Clare treats the bliss of childhood as a blight on the present,
adult self who can vividly recollect his past activities, play and games but
remains radically alienated by his distance from the feelings associated with
them. This is most evident in Clare’s lyric, self-consciously childlike poetics,
which are characterized by the notion that he is now a ‘childish’ intruder
into his own past. Attentive to the stylistic and formal differences in a range of
works by Wordsworth and Clare on childhood, this essay is one of the first
detailed accounts of Clare’s writing on the subject and also one of the first
sustained comparative readings of the two poets.
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Kembali