The Ballad of John Clare - Hugh Lupton, 2010.

Hugh Lupton’s fictional account of a year in the teenage life of ‘peasant poet’ John Clare has been released to the world with the same neglect which Clare’s poetry has suffered over the years, leading to the poet’s glaring omission from the “Big Six” of nineteenth century British Romantic poetry, that is to say, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge and Blake. Clare’s was a mind wrought with anguish over failed love and environmental destruction, leading to institutionalisation for much of his life.

One of the UK’s most prominent professional storytellers – when he begun in the early 1980s there were a mere six in the country- Lupton’s prose style is frank but heartening, simple but endearing, albeit distinctly unoriginal. However when the author sets out to create a fictional world of factual characters, the narrative’s originality and complexity more than make up for a folk revivalist’s lack of literate identity.

Set in a year of the seventeen year old poet’s youth in the Northamptonshire countryside, Lupton guides us through the changing fortunes of the small community of villages which comprised Clare’s home, framed against a calendar of various religious days and festivals, many of which cease to hold any importance two hundred years later in the present day. As enclosure of public rural land begins to take shape and rich farmers divide amongst them that which was for centuries before common peasant land, gypsies are shunned, families are ruined and extreme measures sought in the shadow of the impending Industrial Revolution. The Ballad of John Clare addresses issues that still hold sway today: those of the destruction of our environment, the gap between the richest and poorest in our societies, and the factors in place to perpetuate this divide.

John Clare’s first encounters with love, however, are the real heartstring tugging elements of this novel; a blossoming courtship is destroyed for reasons beyond that of Clare’s poor status- that being the widely held view that his match was deemed unfit by her father, triggering the poet’s descent into madness and poverty. Ultimately, there is still time to save the planet and redress the balance of wealth, but Clare’s descent into despair and obscurity cannot be altered, and as a result his poetry remains unheard and unappreciated by the majority today.