Find John Clare’s POEMS CHIEFLY FROM MANUSCRIPT in our library.
Edmund Blunden, who edited the volume, writes:
For the present volume over two thousand poems by Clare have been considered and compared; of which over two-thirds have not been published. Of those here given ninety are now first printed, and are distinguished with asterisks in the contents: one or two are gleaned from periodicals: and many of the others have been brought into line with manuscript versions. While poetic value has been the general ground of selection, the development of the poet has seemed of sufficient interest for representation; and some of Clare’s juvenilia are accordingly included. The arrangement is chronological, though in many cases the date of a poem can only be conjectured from the handwriting and the style; and it is almost impossible to affix dates to such Asylum Poems as bear none.
Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter in Note to Poems Chiefly from Manuscript
The content word vector (the most frequently used words – ordered by frequency) of this selection chimes:
5584 unique words were used in the poems.
We took a text from The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare (see the link to the chapter provided by Oxford Scholarly Editions in the Resources section below) and created the content word vector of the short piece of 246 words. Here are the first 19 of the 94 unique words:
Resources:
Read up on Content Word Vector.
Explore Blunden’s edition of John Clare: select the author in Quotations.
A text from The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare: