How John Clare's Mental State and its Treatment affected His Literary Output

John Clare, a famous 19th century English peasant poet, was born on July 13, 1793 in Helpston, “a gloomy village in Northamptonshire”(Clare 2). One of his recent biographers Jonathan Bate writes that, “John Clare is the greatest laboring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated unstable self”. There are many views regarding the famous ‘Northamptonshire peasant’ poet’s mental state and how it affected his writings. In this paper I will discuss Clare’s mental state described by Jonathan Bate and Gordon Claridge, et al., and his treatment before and during his life in the asylum affected his literary output in terms of the rate of production of poems, the coherence of his writing, and the subject matter of the poems as proposed by Evan Blackmore.

Growing up in a peasant family, poverty forced Clare to start working alongside his father when he was just 10 years of age (Claridge 115). When he was 11 or 12 years old, three months of the year was spared for his education. Clare soon was in love with reading; he always had a book in his pocket. Some thought of him showing for being odd because he would distance himself from his friends and wander around the woods and fields alone (Claridge 116). Clare realized that he possessed talent in writing poems, especially those about nature. This motivated him to learn further by buying spelling books and a “stock of pencils to keep in his pocket, to write as chance arose” (Claridge 117).

When Clare was in his late 20’s, with the help of Edward Bell Drury and John Taylor, he was able to publish his poems in Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. This book brought him sudden fame but was unfortunately his only successful publication (Claridge 118). Although there were some financial supports from the aristocrats,, they were not enough to sustain his life and his family (his parents, wife, and children were all living in the same building). He was again forced by poverty to work. During this hard time, Drury started recognizing the, “delicacy of Clare’s mental condition. Learning … how sensitive Clare was to criticism that a slight word, the absence of commendation, in short any thing less than praise freely bestowed gives him a mean of his opinion” (Bate 146-7). Drury realized that writing poetry for Clare was a kind of compulsion, which unfortunately over-stimulated him. He ultimately diagnosed Clare with depression (Bate 147).

In 1835, John Taylor wrote about Clare’s condition. This writing happened to be the largest account regarding Clare’s deterioration. “He is not out of his mind; he knows who he is, he can answer question clearly and his memory is well intact” (Bate 407). At the same time Taylor feared that Clare would require confinement in a public asylum. This is because Clare started talking to himself and felt as if he was haunted by demons, and Taylor recorded that Patty, Clare’s wife, said, “he is very violent, I dare say, occasionally” (Bate 406). On July 8, 1837, Fenwick Skrimshire and Thomas Walker signed Clare’s certificate of insanity.

According to Jonathan Bate in his book John Clare a Biography, he claims that Clare suffered from a distressing array of physical and mental symptoms. Throughout Clare’s life there are different conditions and levels of severity (Bate 409). Bate explained how Clare’s poverty and his diet, which consisted principally of bread, potatoes, root vegetables, tea, ale and tobacco (it lacked meat and dairy products due to price), have all sorts of effects possibly on his physical and mental condition. For example, vitamin deficiency the affects brain and nervous system. Clare shows similar symptoms such as, “numbness and burning pains to progressive dementia characterized by apprehension, confusion, derangement and maniacal outbursts” (Bate 410).

Based on Bate’s analysis, Clare conforms to the classical pattern not of schizophrenia but of manic depression or ‘bipolar affective disorder’. A reason for this is that schizophrenia commonly happens in early adulthood, but Clare did not experience a major episode until his late 30’s when he went to the Peterborough theatre, where he had delusions and was hearing strange voices (Bate 412). Also in schizophrenia, thought is disordered, and Bate argues that, “Clare was periodically subject to intrusive thoughts of violent nature, but his disorder was essentially affective. Schizophrenia classically produces emotional coldness and volitional impairment, whereas depression brings powerful emotions the kind on which Clare dwelt in his descriptions of his own illness” (Bate 414).

In the book Sounds from the Bell Jar: Ten Psychotic Authors, the diagnosis given to Clare differs slightly from what Bate had proposed. According to Gordon Claridge, et al., Clare was diagnosed as manic-depressive because he showed severe mood swings. Another indication that Clare may have had schizophrenia were his delusions where he believed he was the poet Byron, and, “that he was a prizefighter whom nobody dare to challenge because of his huge strength” (Claridge 130). Although his delusions could be evidence of ‘manic grandiosity’, another of his delusion seems clearly schizophrenic as is evident in his comment to Agnes Strickland, the historian, when she visited him in the asylum:

“They have cut off my head, and picked out all the letters of the alphabet – all the vowels and consonants – and brought them out through my ears” (Claridge 132).

These signs are supported when Clare began to progressively withdraw from the world. This evidence suggests that a modern diagnosis would label his illness as ‘schizophrenia with a chronic course’ (Claridge 133).

On the subject of the treatment Clare experienced, I observed that there are three types of attempted treatments: his family, Clare himself, and medical treatment. Although his wife, Patty, shared that “He is very violent, I dare say, occasionally” (Bate 406), we also read in Sounds from the Bell Jar, that when he suffered fits of extreme irritation, one of his sons would talk to him quietly to distract and calm him (Claridge 120). Clare also has his own method of medicating himself – he would become drunk so that he would not feel the pain, but he did not realize that he was depressing his mood and worsening his mental state by doing so. The medical treatment Clare experienced throughout his life varies slightly. Before institutionalized by different doctors in the asylum, he was administered pills from Dr. Darling for two years (Claridge 121). Unfortunately, this treatment did not help Clare’s condition.

When Clare was admitted to the asylum, different doctors treated him differently. Dr. Matthew Allen encouraged Clare to write and to walk in the beautiful surroundings of the hospital. When he was treated by Dr. Thomas Prichard, Clare had even more freedom, “as a ‘harmless’ patient, to go into the town, or walk in the neighborhood” (Claridge 128). Even so, Dr. Wing who succeeded Dr Prichard in 1854 confined Clare to the grounds of the hospital because Clare’s condition was “deep melancholy” with only an “occasional lifting of the clouds” (Claridge 129). After being treated by Dr. Wing, Clare’s condition kept worsening until he went into a comatose state and died on May 20, 1864.

In the book John Clare in Context, Summerfield et al. proposed three reasons that Clare’s doctors might not have striven mightily to find to the root of his condition. First, the fact that Earl of Fitzwilliam paid for Clare to be treated there suggests that the doctors simply had Clare stay in the asylum for the money. Second is the assumption that 19th century psychiatric doctors avoided engaging in close encounters with their patients’ psyches, but rather treated them “like a stick furniture” (Summerfield 266). Third, was the idea that the doctors were not eager enough to determine the patients’ conditions, instead simply assuming insanity was, “at root, organic, the product of bad blood reproductive system” (Summerfield 267). Therefore it was not surprising that there were not many records regarding Clare’s mental state.

In his article John Clare’s Psychiatric Disorder and Its Influence on His Poetry, Evan Blackmore diagnoses Clare with a disorder similar to Bate’s diagnosis, bipolar disorder. In this article, Blackmore describes that Clare’s bipolar disorder may have altered the rate of production of poems, the coherence of his writing, the subject matter of the poems, and the way in which that subject-matter was presented.

There are two states that may determine the rate of production of Clare’s poems: manic, in which a study conducted by Winokur noted to have increased levels of activity, thus producing more poems; and depressive episodes, where a patient’s level of activity declines. Although in manic episodes level of activity increase, “patients are frequently very distractible, and that, although they begin many activities, they leave an exceptionally high proportion of them unfinished; a task is begun, the patient is distracted, the first task is set aside and another is begun, the patient is distracted again, the second task is set aside, and so on” (Blackmore 219). Unfortunately for Clare it is very hard to determine his rate of production because there is a lack of evidence of whether he wrote more or even wrote anything during his manic episode of 1841 and during his depressive period between 1824-1825. The only evidence that suggests that Clare had difficulty writing is based on his comments of his poetry where he mentions that writing has become difficult for him in 1824-1825 (Blackmore 220).

Clare’s disorder may have altered the coherence of his writing. There is a phenomenon known as ‘flight ideas’, ‘associative loosening’, or ‘derailment’ in which there is a tendency to increase in the frequency of writing although in the form of “abrupt changes of topic occur during uninterrupted speech” (Blackmore 220). Again, because of the lack of evidence, this may or may not have happened to Clare. Though there are some contemporary reports that it might have influenced the discontinuities of some of the 1841 poems (Blackmore 220).

Another argument by Blackmore is that Clare’s disorder may have affected the subject matter of his poems, or at least the way in which that subject matter is presented. He also categorized Clare’s poems into three groups: description of rural life and rural scenery; poems of sexual love; meditations on human existence and suffering. Based on his observation of Clare’s nature poems before and during his life in the asylum, there are hardly any detectable changes. One of his early nature poems:

Summer

yellow buttercups where many a bee

Comes buzzing to its head and bows it down

And the great dragon flue wi gauzy wings

In gilded coat of purple green or brown

That on broad leaves of hazel basking clings

Fond of the sunny day

The techniques used in the poem are not significantly different from those evident in the nature poems of the asylum years, for example:

The Thrushes Nest

I watched her secret toils from day to day

How true she wraped the moss to form her nest

And modelled it within with wood and clay

And bye and bye like heath bells gilt with dew

There lay her shining eggs as bright flowers

Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue

The poems “are in method remarkably similar. He is intensely and minutely curious, probing the ‘secret’ world of nature, marveling over and delighted at what he discovers there, fastening on little things” (Blackmore 221).

On the other hand, his poems of sexual love show changes but, “the changes in these require separate consideration” (Blackmore 222). This is due to the wide range of topics regarding his sexual love. “The manic phase of [Clare’s] disorder may have led him to write on erotic subjects more frequently than he might otherwise have done and the social isolation caused by his disorder probably protected and perhaps exacerbated a sexist view of women already ingrained in his character before the onset of psychiatric disorder” (Blackmore 227). As we know, in the 19th century, women were considered second to men.

Finally, regarding the meditations on human existence and suffering, there are without a doubt some changes in his poems. Clare’s poems in his early life focus more on nature with intense detail, but this is not the case of his human situation poems. “They lack the grip and focus” compared to his nature poems in his early poetry. The poems he produced during his life in the asylum are very different in that “in their place we have an individual voice speaking of his individual experience” (Blackmore 222). There is a deeper sense of personal engagement – “of grappling with real, and highly important, problems, and as a result the poem is far more telling, comes far closer to being a ‘proof sufficient’ of the ‘vanity’ of life” compared to any of his early poems (Blackmore 223).

Although not many of his poems are known especially during his life in the asylum, due to unfinished or missing poems, Clare’s most famous poem written during this period is:

I Am

I am––yet what I am, none cares or knows;

My friend forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes––

They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host

Like shadows in love-frenzied stifled throes––

And yet I am, and live––like vapors tossed

When reading this poem, I can relate to his feelings of loneliness, the pain of life he has to go through by himself, and how in life he is just alive but without a spirit–like vapors tossed. I think this is what made Clare famous, the fact that the readers do not have to suffer under the same disorder or mental state, yet the poems are so realistic and speak of the truth and longing of all human beings – freedom.

In conclusion, Clare’s disorder had undoubtedly influenced his work, but it did so in multiple, complex ways which cannot be reduced to “a simple matter of gain or loss” (Blackmore 228). In terms of what mental state John Clare had, I would most likely agree with the argument presented by Jonathan Bate and Evan Blackmore, that what Clare suffered from was bipolar disorder as seen in the manic-depressive episodes that he had throughout his life in the asylum. Although as Blackmore says, it is hard to simplify Clare’s mental state because there is not enough evidence. More important than his mental illness is the fact that Clare as a peasant poet achieved his dream to share his talent through his poetry. He successfully relates to his reader’s emotions by describing his own feeling and what he went through in his life.

Works Cited

Bate, Jonathan. John Clare A Biography. Oxford: Pan Macmillan, 2003. Print.

Blackmore, Evan. “John Clare’s Psychiatric Disorder and Its Influence on His Poetry.” Victorian Poetry 24.3 (1986): 209-228. Web. 28 June 2010.

Clare, John. John Clare by Himself. Ashington: Mid Northumberland Arts Group, 1996. Print.

Claridge, Gordon, Ruth Pryor, and Gwen Watkins. Sounds from the Bell Jar: Ten Psychotic Authors. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990. Print.

Summerfield, Geoffrey, Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips. John Clare in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Print.

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