Poems of the Middle Period

This double volume contains some of Clare's very best work. The Midsummer Cushion (named for the local Helpstone children's custom of inserting wildflowers into rectangles of turf to make 'cushions' of flowers and grasses) includes the poems that Clare himself regarded as the finest of his previously-unpublished work. The Midsummer Cushion is a book in which Clare became his own editor, for the first and only time, and which he originally intended to publish by subscription, thereby asserting his independence of the established commercial system by becoming his own publisher and bookseller. The scheme, though it got off to a promising start, ultimately failed because of Clare's declining mental and physical health. Instead, it was replaced by an idiosyncratic selection from the book, made by Mrs Emmerson, Clare's patron, and edited by Mrs Emmerson and John Taylor, entitled The Rural Muse. We believe our text to be the most accurate version of the manuscript yet published and, from it, the book, The Rural Muse, may easily be reconstructed by the reader.
This presentation of The Midsummer Cushion is accompanied in Volume IV by poems in associated manuscripts that were not selected by Clare for that volume, many of them not previously published or only published in fugitive or limited form. These volumes represent the third and fourth of five volumes devoted to Clare's 'middle period', between 1822 and 1837, arguably the years of his finest creativity. The poems contained in these volumes range from examples of Clare's satirical and political verse, in 'The Summons' and 'The Hue and Cry', to a telling expression of his philosophy of nature, in 'The Eternity of Nature', and probably the most important statement of Clare's poetic objectives in 'To the Rural Muse'. If there is any lingering belief in the 'sameness' of Clare's verse, these volumes ought surely to disperse it. A final volume, containing the poems of the Northborough period and corrections to previous volumes, will complete the Poems of the Middle Period and the nine-volume edition of Clare's poetry.