In honour of the 150th anniversary of his death, Oxford University Press has issued a handsome and well-priced hardback of their text of The Shepherd's Calendar, with evocative wood engravings by David Gentleman. A health warning should be attached: the volume follows the annoyingly "primitivist" textual strategy of reproducing the poems not from the text prepared by his editors for public consumption but from Clare's original manuscripts, which had no punctuation and highly irregular spelling. It is true that Clare fell out with Taylor over his increasingly interventionist editorial approach to dialect words — Clare wanted to preserve the voice of his region whereas Taylor pushed the work in the direction of standard English — but it was never Clare's intention that his work should be read without punctuation and with irregular spelling, something that plays into the stereotype of "the peasant poet". Most poets at the time, Cambridge-educated Wordsworth and Byron included, left punctuation to their editors. It would have been easy enough for Oxford University Press to create a text that respected the norms of punctuation and spelling, as Clare intended, while restoring those dialect works and purposeful solecisms that Taylor excised.

So in giving the flavour of Clare on a summer's day I shall take the liberty of inserting some punctuation into the lovely opening lines of "June":

Now summer is in flower and nature's hum
Is never silent round her sultry bloom;
Insects as small as dust are never done
With glittering dance and reeling in the sun;
And greenwood fly and blossom-haunting bee
Are never weary of their melody;
Round field-hedge now flowers in full glory twine
Large bindweed bells, wild hops and streaked woodbine
That lift athirst their slender-throated flowers
Agape for dewfalls and for honey showers
These round each bush in sweet disorder run
And spread their wild hues to the sultry sun.

No other writer has evoked the fecundity and the "sweet disorder" of the English countryside with such clarity and force. No other writer has so presciently preserved the landscapes and customs of rural England that were vanishing even as he sketched them. And no other writer who has lived with the black cloud of depression has given his readers so many visions of how both the natural world and the work of poetry itself can pour balm upon the hurt mind. He deserves to be read and loved long after his rural England is finally gone.