Mildred M. Coen's 1922 thesis opens not with Clare's verse but with a detailed account of the English enclosure movement, establishing that by the poet's birth in 1793, a land revolution had already pauperized much of the rural population. Coen explains the open field system and the parliamentary process by which wealthy landlords consolidated common lands, noting that the change was 'too rapid' and altered the character of national life. This economic framing immediately positions Clare's poetry as a response to material conditions, not merely pastoral idyll.

Economic Groundwork Before the Verse

Coen devotes her first section entirely to the mechanics of enclosure: private bills, stacked committees, and commissions that distributed land according to the wishes of noblemen. She acknowledges that enclosures increased national wealth and enabled modern farming, but emphasizes the human cost—a rural population stripped of common rights. This context is not background color; it is the lens through which she will read Clare. The thesis argues that the poet's lament for lost meadows and hedgerows is inseparable from the legal and economic forces that erased them. Coen's prose is direct and unsentimental, treating Clare's world as a case study in agrarian change.

Clare's Life as a Laborer-Poet

The biographical section traces Clare's experience as a field worker who fainted from exhaustion and hunger. Coen draws a pointed contrast with George Crabbe's The Village, which describes a boy collapsing from overwork—lines Coen says 'might have come aptly from Clare.' Yet she insists that Clare's own social poems contain 'never a trace of bitterness.' Instead, he writes of haymaking with 'laughing maids and shouting boys.' This observation is key to Coen's argument: Clare's resentment, when it appears, is directed not at landlords but at the loss of beauty. The poet longed for his own plot of ground, but enclosures made that impossible; his verse mourns the 'green's gone' rather than the injustice that took it.

Nature Observed, Not Idealized

Coen catalogs Clare's precise attention to small creatures: a 'clumbling mouse' gnawing dead leaves, a moth 'dancing with lily-white wings,' a snail 'cautious and fearful as thieves.' She asserts that 'no other poet has such a collection of insects and animals.' These details are not decorative; they ground Clare's nature poetry in empirical observation rather than romantic convention. Coen notes that the love poems reveal the 'tender emotional love-life of the laborer' despite material hardship, and that the nature poems show a peasant 'rich in poetic sentiments and intimate observations.' The thesis consistently treats Clare's eye for the specific as his defining technical strength.

Lamentation as Political Voice

Coen's most striking claim is that Clare's poems about enclosures are not protests but elegies. When he writes 'the green's gone, too—ah, lovely scene,' the tone is loss, not anger. She quotes his lament for vanished kingcups and milkmaids' calls, and the 'Village Minstrel' passage mourning daisies 'like sheets of snow' and crow-flower buds 'like golden sunbeams.' Coen argues that Clare's prevailing mode is 'lamentation—for the passing of the meadow-blooms and pasture-flowers.' Even when he denounces conditions, the emotional center is grief for what has been erased. This reading reframes Clare's politics as a poetry of mourning rather than rebellion.

Coen's thesis is a compact work of historical criticism that never loses sight of the poems themselves. Readers will benefit from moving between her economic and biographical chapters and the verse excerpts she analyzes. The study is most valuable for its insistence on Clare's specificity—his insects, his flowers, his precise grief—and for its refusal to sentimentalize either the poet or the rural world he recorded.