CLARE, John.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. First edition, first issue, of the poet's first book, attractively bound by Riviere, preserving the half-title and errata slip. The book caused a sensation on publication, partly due to the contemporary vogue for "rustic" poetry; all 1,000 copies of the first edition sold out in two months, and three further editions were printed the same year.The son of a Northamptonshire thresher and wrestler, John Clare (1793-1864) began writing poetry after reading James Thomson's The Seasons. He offered his first fruits to his local bookseller Edward Drury, a cousin of John Taylor of the publishers Taylor & Hessey (who had issued Keats's poems) in 1819, in order to forestall his parents' eviction from their home. The result was Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. He published only three further books: The Village Minstrel (1821), The Shepherd's Calendar (1827), and The Rural Muse (1835).During his lifetime, Clare was celebrated as an English Robert Burns, and his poetic talents, seemingly springing from nowhere, caught the attention of a reading public fascinated by the idea of "inspiration" and its sources in nature.

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