John Clare and the Ubiquitous Editor Essay -- Clare Poet Poem Poetic E

John Clare and the Ubiquitous Editor Editors have always played an important and powerful role in the works of John Clare, from Clare’s own time until the present. An Invite to Eternity presents a model of that relationship between text and editor in microcosm, from its composition inside the walls of a mental institution to its transcription by an asylum attendant, to its early publication and its modern re-presentation today. Written in the 1840s, no extant manuscript of the poem exists in Clare’s own hand and each version of the poem is inflected by its editor in different but always significant ways. In recent years, this is reflected in the sole copyright control over Clare’s work exercised by his most prominent editor, whose own interpretation of Clare governs the way the poet and his poems are presented to a modern audience. The publication history of all of John Clare’s work is, in the end, a history about editorial control and influence. Even An Invite to Eternity, written within the confines of a mental institution seemingly distant from the literary world, is not an exception to this rule, for it and Clare’s other asylum poems do not escape the power and problem of the editor. And, further, this problem of the editor is not one confined to the past, to the actions of Clare’s original publisher John Taylor or to W.F. Knight, the asylum house steward who transcribed the poetry Clare wrote during his 20 odd years of confinement. In fact, debates continue and rankle over the role of the editor in re-presenting Clare’s work to a modern audience: should the modern editor present the unadulterated, raw Clare manuscript or a cleaned up, standardized version as Taylor did? Only exacerbating and exaggerating this problem o... ... (29)Haughton. (30)Hugh Haughton and Adam Phillips, â€Å"Introduction: Relocating John Clare,† John Clare in Context. Ed. Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips, Geoffrey Summerfield. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 19. (31)Haughton and Phillips, 19; see Robinson, xii. (32)Robinson, xii. (33)See The John Clare Page for a bibliography of news and journal articles concerning the controversy. (34)Robert Mendick, ‘Poets Protest as US Scholar Corners Clare’, Independent on Sunday, 16 July 2000. Online. (35)John Goodridge, â€Å"Poor Clare,† The Guardian, July 22, 2000. Online. (36)Goodridge; The John Clare Page. (37)‘John Clare’s Copyright’ (letter), Times Literary Supplement, July 14 2000, p. 15. (38)See Times Higher Education Supplement (39)See the Robinson version of the poem and the Grigson version, an example of the â€Å"standardized† Clare.