THE GRANDFATHER OF NEW NATURE WRITING WAS A BIRD-LOVING POET

JOHN CLARE, PEASANT POET, ORNITHOLOGIST

By Stephen Moss

No other poet wrote about birds as often—or as well—as John Clare. This 19th-century farm laborer turned man of letters was, as the ornithologist and broadcaster James Fisher deftly put it: “the finest poet of Britain’s minor naturalists and the finest naturalist of Britain’s major poets.”
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Thanks to his field skills, observational talents and hard-won expertise, Clare’s writings contain references to at least 120 (and possibly as many as 150) different species. These observations give us a profound insight into the dramatic and often devastating changes to the birds of our farmed countryside over the past 200 years. Foremost amongst these is the loss of the bird Clare described as a ubiquitous “summer noise among the meadow hay”: the corncrake or, as Clare called it, the landrail.
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Patronized by the London literati as a “peasant poet,” Clare, and in due course his poetry and prose, were intimately linked to the place where he grew up, and spent the majority of his life: the village of Helpston. Living on the edge of the flat, watery fens of East Anglia, but also close to the classic “Middle England” landscape of Northamptonshire, the young Clare could explore fields and meadows, streams and rivers, woods and fens, and get to know their birdlife.

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