Harback, signed, first edition
John Clare and the Folk Tradition offers a unique insight into the culture and tradition that inspired one of England’s finest poets. As a collector of folk-song, John Clare was recording, earlier than anyone else in Southern England, the oral and music traditions of a pre-industrial village. As a fiddle player he left a permanent record of the nearly 300 tunes he collected and played for his own enjoyment and, as a villager, he has given us a wonderful evocation of the custom, folklore and beliefs he shared with his contemporaries in Helpston, Northamptonshire, in the early years of the nineteenth century. The book is illustrated with examples of Clare’s poetry and photographic reproductions of Clare manuscripts and contemporary broadsides. In this book George Deacon brings this material together for the first time and shows how powerful an influence the folk tradition had on the development and maturity of John Clare the poet. A rare opportunity to understand how the villagers of the pre-industrial village entertained, cheered and consoled themselves given to us by one the finest descriptive poets in the English Language.
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