Abstract
By way of background, my suspicions regarding a Clare-Cavendish connection began a quarter century ago, when fellow Clare scholar, James McKusick, and I began editorial work on a teaching anthology of British and American nature writing from 1600 to the present.2 Because Cavendish is one of the most noteworthy early women writers about nature, she had an important place in the project, and I was able present her remarkable work in the context of the broader tradition of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century natural history.3 I found provocative echoes of her themes and style in Clare's poetry. [...]I noted what seemed like intriguing parallels between the lives and interests of 'Mad Madge' and 'Mad John', not the least of which included their being labeled as 'mad' for their writing and ambitions. [...]her 'A Dialogue Between An Oak, and a Man Cutting Him Down' opens with the Oak enumerating all the benefits he has provided to man, from meeting his practical needs like shelter to offering him aesthetic pleasures by giving the birds a place to sing.5 Planning to use the oak's wood to build a ship, the man looks to the abundance of acorns ready to replace the fully matured tree as a justification for his destructive actions. While one could make a case that these poems are not about nature per se, but allegories pertaining to court politics (comparable to, for instance, Dryden's The Hind and the Panther), I believe it is not anachronistic to argue that they may also stand as a protest against the human oppression of nature and the exploitation of natural resources. There is certainly a basis here for an ecological non-instrumental relation to the natural world'.7 Such a democratization of relations is everywhere apparent in Clare's nature poetry as well, as any number of his poems demonstrate.