In Our Time

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

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Melvyn Bragg

Jonathan Bate

Mina Gorji

Simon Kovesi

Simon Tillotson

In Our Time: John Clare

John Clare

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, John Clare

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Clare, poet and farm labourer.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Clare, the 'Northamptonshire peasant poet', whose writing was as celebrated as his life was humble.

In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Northamptonshire poet John Clare who, according to one of Melvyn's guests Jonathan Bate, was 'the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced'. Clare worked in a tavern, as a gardener and as a farm labourer in the early 19th century and achieved his first literary success with Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. He was praised for his descriptions of rural England and his childhood there, and his reaction to the changes he saw in the Agricultural Revolution with its enclosures, displacement and altered, disrupted landscape. Despite poor mental health and, from middle age onwards, many years in asylums, John Clare continued to write and he is now seen as one of the great poets of his age.

With 

Sir Jonathan Bate
Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford

Mina Gorji
Senior Lecturer in the English Faculty and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge

and 

Simon Kövesi
Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

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