John Clare, The Village Minstrel

Andrew Smith (University of Melbourne)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.06: English Writing and Culture of the Romantic Period, 1789-1837.
Vol. editors: Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Daniel Robinson (Widener University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1821

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Pastoral
Poem collection

Resources

The two-volume collection The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems (1821) was the “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet” John Clare’s second publication, following Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820). The collection is divided into two sections: “Poems”, which makes up the first volume and part of the second, comprises seventy-one poems of various forms, opening with the long, semi-autobiographical “The Village Minstrel”; the second section, which ends the second volume, is made up of sixty sonnets.

Like their predecessors, the poems in The Village Minstrel are broadly “descriptive of rural life and scenery”. Clare presents vignettes of rural work and leisure, describing the …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2751 words

Citation: Smith, Andrew. "The Village Minstrel". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 February 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8054, accessed 26 November 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article

Save this article