“I’m John Clare now. I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly. At different times you know I’m different people—that is the same person with different names.”¹ Confined in a lunatic asylum, John Clare adopted other people’s voices. He told visitors he was Jack Randall, the boxer; he wrote poems as Lord Byron and as William Cowper. This adoption of other poet’s voices may or may not have been related to a belief that he shared their identities. Some visitors to Northampton asylum were persuaded that Clare was deluded, yet a fellow inmate spoke of a deliberate and skilful performance: “A great knack of personating.”² Allusion or delusion? Certainly Clare’s habit of writing in language that everywhere invoked that of a favorite poet was a crafted performance; if he did believe himself to be Byron or Cowper, this belief may have been his unconscious endorsement of the success of his verse impersonation. It’s more likely, however, given the strategic nature of his adoption of other poets’ authorial personae, that he was perfectly conscious that he was only Byron or Cowper in the sense that his poetry was an art of his own that constantly called upon theirs, both by alluding to phrases, genres, and themes associated with them and also by imitating their style, so that even when his words were entirely his own they seemed to be echoes ofThe Task andDon Juan.

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© 2015 Tim Fulford

Policies and ethics