Clare, John.  Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. London: Taylor & Hessey and E Drury, 1820.  Octavo, original gray drab boards rebacked in paper to style. $3500.

First edition, first issue (with errata slip) of the first book of one of the greatest poets of the Romantic movement. 

“After years of indifference and neglect, John Clare (1793-1864) is now recognized as one of the greatest English Romantic poets. Clare was an impoverished agricultural laborer, whose genius was generally not appreciated by his contemporaries, and his later mental instability further contributed to his loss of critical esteem. But the extraordinary range of his poetical gifts has restored him to the company of contemporaries like Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.” (Oxford University Press edition of John Clare’s Works, December 2004).

“Clare is chronologically the last—and next to Robert Burns he is perhaps now the most famous—of the line of poets whom the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries praised as examples of ‘original genius.’ He was born in the village of Helpston, Northamptonshire, the son of a farm laborer who could barely read… A sensitive child, and extremely delicate in health, he quickly acquired the knack of writing verse.” When he was twenty-four he attracted the attention of the London publisher John Taylor, and the firm of Taylor and Hessey—the same firm that was now publishing Keats—soon published his first book of poetry, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820). It became “immediately popular, going through four editions in a year, and during a brief visit to London Clare met Coleridge, Lamb, DeQuincey, and other writers.” Soon after this early success, Clare suffered a debilitating mental breakdown and spent much of the remaining 23 years of his life in an asylum. (David Perkins, English Romantic Writers). Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery has come to be regarded as a touchstone for the Romantic movement and selections of Clare’s poetry are now included in every major anthology of Romantic poetry. Small blindstamp "ex libris Diana Lenygon" on front free endpaper. Staining to front board, some fraying to corners, minor occasional spots of foxing. Rare in original boards.