Title: Don't buy this book
Product review: John Clare is a fantastic poet, but this is a corrupt edition of his poems. The editor, one Jonathan Bate, has gone through and punctuated Clare's poems, despite Clare's explicit wishes that his poems be left as he wrote them (virtually without punctuation). If editors were still "tidying up" Emily Dickinson's equally idiodyncratic punctuation, we'd have their heads, but somehow this editor has gotten away with bowdlerizing Clare. If you want a bigger slection with more accurate texts, check out The Oxford Authors: John Clare, David Powell and Eric Robinson, eds., ISBN 0192813951.
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