John Clare's World

This essay puts the work – both poetry and prose – of the English Romantic peasant-poet John Clare in dialogue with exciting and timely recent work in continental philosophy and ecocritical theory regarding the (in)existence of "the World" as a closed, unified totality that contains all possible domains. The challenge in the wake of such work is to think interconnectedness without totality; this paradigm, I argue, is especially fitting for revisiting Clare and his chief concerns. Informed in particular by the work of Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, and Jean-Luc Nancy, I shall examine the hitherto mostly undetected ontological implications of such prominent critical lynchpins as Clare's localism and his resistance to enclosure. My contention is that going back to Clare and reading him alongside contemporary thinkers can help us better analyze and ultimately confront urgent intellectual and material challenges posed to us by globalization – that regime of abstract equivalence and massive act of modern enclosure. As I hope to show, Clare teaches us to speak not of The World, but of a world, or worlds in the plural – what I shall call "local worlds," brimming with their own networks of coexistence and interdependence, of sharing and shared being-in-common.