Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio SoHereWeAre I thought that I might approach the idea of celebrity and issues around that cultural phenomenon in relation to English poetry. Initially I thought of Barry MacSweeney’s brush with celebrity in 1968 when his publisher, Hutchinson, nominated him for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry at the age of nineteen, following the success of his first book, The Boy From The Green Cabaret Tells Of His Mother (1968), and of how he turned away from the marketing plans of a large publisher to embrace the small and independent presses and a more profound approach to poetry. MacSweeney maintained a sharp eye on public events and language culminating in his unpublished Mary Bell Sonnets. The fact that these remain unpublished put a scupper on sketching how celebrity impacted upon his work. Secondly I thought of John Clare’s direct experience of the impact of Lord Byron’s celebrity as he watched Byron’s funeral cortége of sixty four carriages travel through London in July 1824 and of Clare’s own short-lived time as an object of curiosity as a rural poet and how he mangled his own identity with that of Byron’s celebrity in those extraordinary poems written when he was hospitalised in Epping Forest. In July 1841 having been at High Beach Asylum for three and a half years, Clare’s explorations of identity and experience culminated in his mixing of Byron’s identity and birthday with his own. He had been constantly shifting from his versions of Don Juan to Childe Harold, from Bryon’s model of sexual freedom to his own sexual losses, and finally united his inner and outer worlds by walking out of the hospital and back to his home in rural Northampton. The heavens are wrath – the thunders rattling peal Rolls like a vast volcano in the sky Yet nothing starts the apathy I feel Nor chills with fear eternal destiny My soul is apathy – a ruin vast Time cannot clear the ruined mass away My life is hell – the hopeless die is cast & manhoods prime is premature decay That from Childe Harold is followed by this Don Juan rendering Give toil more pay where rank starvation lurches & pay your debts & put your books to rights Leave whores & playhouses & fill your churches Old clovenfoot your dirty victory fights Like theft he still on natures manor poaches & holds his feasting on anothers rights To show plain truth you act in bawdy farces Men show their tools - & maids expose their arses Now this day is the eleventh of July & being Sunday I will seek no flaw In man or woman – but prepare to die In two days more I may that ticket draw & so may thousands more as well as I To day is here – the next who ever saw & In a madhouse I can find no mirth pay - Next Tuesday used to be Lord Byron’s birthday Lord Byron poh – the man wot rites the werses & is just what he is & nothing more Who with his pen lies like the mist disperses & makes all nothing as it was before (John Clare The Living Year 1841 Ed Tim Chilcott Trent Editions 1999 pp.50-51) The conflation of Byron’s identity and freedom with his own situation and that of the rural poor is complete and he musters the necessary will to attempt to break free. Byron was arguably the first modern celebrity. He played, to quote Marilyn Butler, ‘a larger part than any other single artist in shaping the stereotype soon recognised throughout Europe, the passionate, rebellious Romantic Poet.’ (Romantics, Rebels & Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 OUP 1981) Greece declared a day of national mourning upon his death. News of his gallant death spread across the major towns and cities of Europe. The cult of Byron impacted upon artists, composers, musicians and writers throughout Europe reaching Russia and Scotland. Many people who had never known him were saddened by the loss. The fourteen year old Alfred Tennyson never forgot the day when he heard the news, remembering it as ‘a day when the whole world darkened for me’. John Clare noted the impac