i A HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CLARE'S MUNDANE SUBLIME by Dana Odwazny Pell A Thesis ...

69 Pages·2012·1.42 MB·English

by  Dana Odwazny

A HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CLARE’S MUNDANE SUBLIME

by

Dana Odwazny Pell

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

August 2012

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A HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CiiL
  ARE’S MUNDANE SUBLIM
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to share my sincere appreciation and love to my friends, family, and husband
for their support throughout this project. Their encouragement kept me writing even
when my focus waned. I would also like to express my continued gratitude for my
academic springboard, Betsy Cohen. Miles might separate us, but we have come a long
way together. In addition, I am indebted to the Florida Atlantic English department
faculty, especially Dr. Golden, Dr. Berlatsky, Dr. Adams, and Dr. McGuirk. Each of you
has inspired and humbled me.

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ABSTRACT

Author: Dana Odwazny Pell

Title: A Humdrum Aha!: John Clare’s Mundane Sublime

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Don Adams

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2012

Following the work of Sara Houghton-Walker and Edward Strickland, this thesis
theorizes the “mundane sublime” as encountered in romanticist John Clare’s poetry.
Instead of being oriented upward, as with Longinus’s elevatory sublime, Clare’s
mundane sublime brings the subject downward to earth. While the sublime of the
Burkean tradition begins with terror, I claim that the mundane sublime emerges out of
love for that which is commonplace. Still revelatory, it may be further characterized by
an engagement with ecosystems, eternity, divinity, and nature as a whole. Clare’s style
scaffolds images resulting in a profusion of detail that arrests the mind and allows it to
reflect on its own position in nature. As Clare’s mundane sublime takes up simple natural
objects and posits an ecological interconnectedness, it implies a more environmentally
responsible relationship to one’s surroundings, making it increasingly relevant for green
studies.

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A HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CLARE’S MUNDANE SUBLIME

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1
“On which I love to dwell”: Clare’s Nature.……………………………………………..15
“[T]hose comforts we desire”: The Tempest Versus the Sun-Shower.……………….....27
Enclosing Clare’s ecosystem; Anguish in an Economy of Mind.……………...………..39
Conclusion.………………………………………………………………………….…...53
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..59

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1. INTRODUCTION

Nature has judged man a creature of no mean or ignoble quality, but, as if
she were inviting us to some great gathering, she has called us into life,
into the whole universe, there to be spectators of her games and eager
competitors; and she therefore from the first breathed into our hearts an
unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than
ourselves.
--Longinus, Peri Hypsous

I like to make the mundane fabulous whenever I can.
--Rufus Wainwright

In the last four decades, scholarly interest in John Clare’s life and work has
increased greatly. Marginalized as somehow separate from the romantic tradition, his
poems had been written off as too simplistic or merely descriptive (Houghton, Todd). As
Eric Robinson writes, “he has long remained the most undervalued of English writers….
Clare’s knowledge of natural life is unparalleled among English poets: Wordsworth was
an amateur to him” (7). Romanticists have certainly made strides to accept the mad
“peasant poet” into the canon, prompting more thoughtful analysis of his poetry’s austere
clarity, provincial language, and extensive detail of animals and plants. In particular,
consideration for Clare’s poetry is important because it contributes to the practice of
green literary criticism—to a reading focused on the importance and significance of the
environment and environmental concerns. While scholars have hitherto viewed his work
as devoid of the natural sublime, evidence of it nevertheless emerges out of his
deceptively simple descriptions. Consideration for Clare’s poetry also adds to our
understanding of the history of the sublime by drawing our attention to lesser-known

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theorists and ideas.
In her review of relevant critical texts, “John Clare and Revaluation” (2005),
Sarah Houghton-Walker not only turns her eye backward recounting the beginning of
academic interest in Clare’s biography, but she also looks forward proposing a hitherto
untrodden avenue of scholarship: “[an] area which has not been fully explored by
criticism (though it has often inspired other artists) . . . is Clare’s knowledge of the
discourse of the sublime, and the way in which his verse articulates a sublimity felt in the
presence of nature” (17). Recognizing such a gap in the literature, Houghton-Walker fills
it with her article “‘Enkindling ecstasy’: The Sublime Vision of John Clare” and her later
book John Clare’s Religion. In these two works, she directs our gaze to Clare’s brand of
the sublime, which she sees as embedded in Christian values. Consideration for the
sublime is integral to reading Clare’s poetry because it sheds light not only on his
spiritual beliefs, but also on his use of paradox and language (177). She qualifies her
choice of words as she writes, “Clare’s very perception of the world at times partakes of a
quasi-sublime experience whose translation into poetry marks some of his best verse”
(“Enkindling” 177; emphasis added). Discerning the ways in which Clare appropriates
the concept for his own, Houghton-Walker troubles the definition of the sublime. She
shows us how Clare experiences a language-resistant ecstasy at the sight of the minute
and ordinary, rather than the immense and terrifying.
I will engage and extend Houghton-Walker’s undertaking in order to demonstrate
that Clare’s version of the sublime not only relies upon the ordinary, but that it also
evokes a tension between the familiar and the strange. Furthermore, I will situate the
sublime as it arises in Clare’s poetry within an ecological framework. Above all,

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Houghton-Walker’s analysis paves the way for this undertaking to advance what I call
the “mundane sublime.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines the “mundane” as
“[b]elonging to the earthly world, as contrasted with heaven; worldly, earthly,” common-
place, and boring. Given these denotations, the mundane sublime might seem like a
contradiction in terms. Still, it is an extension of the romantic project set forth by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads—to open poetry to the
commoner, to utilize pedestrian speech in a poetic manner. I contend that, for the most
part, Clare’s collection of poetry represents a redistribution of value. It values the
undervalued and the overlooked; it values the small. Certainly, Clare’s poems that depict
roosters or mice function differently than do “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or “Lines
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abby.” Watching rain fall into a puddle is not the
same as peering over a cliff at an expansive, tumultuous ocean, albeit the experience may
be classified or characterized as the mundane sublime because it too inspires awe. For
Clare, a mole-hill is as impressive as a mountain. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine how
his descriptions of all too familiar objects might be overshadowed in comparison to those
that are new, unexpected, and more grandiose.
Previous to Houghton-Walker’s efforts, the only other work to reflect on any kind
of sublimity in Clare’s aesthetic was Edward Strickland’s “Clare and the Sublime”
(1987). In his essay, Strickland confesses his surprise over the apparent lack of sublime
elements in Clare’s body of work. Compiling an inventory of poetic moments, he notes
the “virtual absence” of “the naturalistic as well as preternatural sublime—until we
confront those few late visionary poems” (142). Moreover, he claims that Clare
purposefully evades that terror which is integral to the traditional sublime because of “his

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psychological constitution and timidity” (143). This comment displays a twofold critical
tendency. The first is to label Clare’s pre-asylum poetry as unphilosophical or
unemotional. The second is to strictly define the sublime according to those standards
authored and perpetuated by the “accepted” romantic poets and by particular critics.
These figures include individuals like John Dennis, Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke,
Immanuel Kant, and its earliest originator, Longinus.
In the discipline’s foundational text, Peri Hypsous, Longinus1 writes of
superlative rhetoric that is sublime because it is exemplary, enduring, forceful, and
inspiring: “the true sublime naturally elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud
exaltation, we are filled with joy and pride” (179). Sublime speech or writing transports
us with an overwhelming power attributed to eloquence and directness. Ranging from
form and diction to a work’s thematic content, Longinus methodically breaks down the
elements of sublime oratory or writing into five main groupings: “grand conceptions,”
“vehement emotion,” “figures of thought and figures of speech,” and “nobility of
language” (181). Even though he lays out his treatise as a lesson in ars poetica, the
production of the sublime—that ability to move the audience beyond themselves—relies
upon what is described as a mysterious divine or daemonic possession of the author or
speaker. At its inception, then, the definition of the sublime is slippery. The sublime
experience eludes language, and it is perhaps for this reason that so many individuals in
the wake of Longinus tried to pin down its meaning in a range of nuanced and sometimes
contradictory definitions.
After 1674, when Despréaux Boileau translated Peri Hypsous into French,

1 The exact author of the text is unknown, but it is most often ascribed to Dionysius

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consideration for the subject came into vogue among the British literati. If not ushering in
considerations for the experience, travel writing and the picturesque coincided with its
reception. At this time, questions regarding subjectivity and taste, genius and craft,
education and class were brought to the fore anew. Among English intellectuals, the
sublime was psychologized as an experience one could have not only by writing,
listening, or reading, but also through a face-to-face encounter with nature. The discourse
of the sublime sparked a shift in popular culture as individuals reassessed passion through
the “natural sublime” (Shaw, Nicolson). While excessive political or religious fervor had
been shunned and repressed because of its dangerous ability to inspire upheaval in a
particularly uneasy political atmosphere, the sublime safely directed enthusiasm toward
nature, toward panoramic scenes. Even though scholars of the period widely disagreed on
many particulars concerning the sublime and the beautiful, they each furthered the idea
that it is a climactic intellectual experience and the paramount of artistic composition.
Despite lingering questions over its location—in nature, in an idea, or in great writing—
the sublime was generally and conventionally thought of as an aesthetic encounter in
which one turns the mind toward a point beyond the grasp of language.
In his seminal work, The Sublime, Samuel Monk conceives of the sublime as a
category of aesthetics that allowed the English of the eighteenth century to appreciate
extraordinary phenomena that lacked beauty by neo-classical standards. In other words, it
provided a vocabulary for young, wealthy, educated males to share and embellish their
journeys to the Alps after embarking on their tours of Europe, as was the trend at the
time. While they travelled, men like John Dennis and Joseph Addison encountered
natural scenes that did not behave according to proper harmony, balance, and proportion.

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