John Clare’s first volume of poetry, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), was the most popular of the four volumes Clare published during his lifetime, going through four editions by 1821 and selling more than 3,500 copies by 1829, when Clare’s publishers sent him a series of accounts. According to these same accounts, The Village Minstrel (1821) had sold 1,250 copies and The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827) had sold only 425 copies.

Poems Descriptive contains around seventy poems, organised under three headings – poems, songs and ballads, and sonnets. As the title suggests, the poems generally describe rural life but they do so from the perspective of the rural

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Published 21 October 2009

Citation: Smith, Andrew. "Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery". The Literary Encyclopedia. 21 October 2009.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2681, accessed 21 November 2009.]