Wondering about John Clare

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a word used wrongly by a poet who often took pride in his own wrongness. Unlike Browning and Wordsworth, John Clare paid little attention to details like spelling and punctuation: he depended on editors for clean copy. So what should readers make of his writing “wander” with an “o” in one poem and an “a” in another? Or of his invoking both meanings—wondering and wandering—in a single poem, but spelling them the same? Resisting the urge to gloss over this mistake, either by shrugging it off as a careless misspelling or by treating the words as yoked, the chapter disentangles the idea of mistake from carelessness on the one hand and lack of knowledge or education on the other. It calls for the possibility of blundering even amid competing editorial concerns over what constitutes a draft and when to edit for consistency, suggesting that readers have much to gain by distinguishing Clare's feigned errors from his unwilling mistakes.