When John Clare writes in ‘The Progress of Rhyme’ that beauty and joy in the natural world lead to ‘love and poesy’, he articulates a poetic manifesto rooted in the Romantics’ love of nature. For Clare, the ‘love and pleasure’ of nature instills in him a fellow-feeling: ‘For every thing I felt a love / The weeds below the birds above’ (ll. 83–4). This particular kind of love leads to a heightened awareness of the details and intricacies of the natural world through which human subjectivity gradually withdraws into the mesh of existence. Clare details ‘thistle[s]’, ‘weed[s]’, ‘sheep & cows & oxen’, ‘kindly rain’, ‘flowers’, the ‘sky’, ‘sunshine’, and ‘insects’, all part of an interconnected and interdependent system (ll. 90, 92, 95–6, 98, 100, 102, 191). ‘For natures love’, writes Clare, is everywhere (l. 104). The human self—as well as the various subjectivities of birds, insects, trees, and weeds—vanishes into the infinite variations and complexities of the world.

This move, so common in Clare's poetry, is a formal embodiment of ecological love, or what Aaron Moe terms ‘ecophilia’—that is, an all-inclusive love of all things in the world. The major distinction between ‘ecological love’ and ‘human love’ is the former's inclusivity and the latter's exclusivity; while human love typically refers to an affectionate or passionate relationship between two individuals, ecophilia refers to a love of all things. Clare's ecological love is even more inclusive than what Edward O. Wilson famously calls ‘biophilia’, or an inherent love of all living things. While scholarship generally acknowledges that ‘love of nature’ is a recurring motif in Clare's poetry, especially love of his home village, Helpston, ecophilia is not typically a central focus in Clare studies. For example, James McKusick devotes an entire chapter to Clare in Green Writing, but his attention to the poet's love of nature is rather a given than a central focus of analysis. Nicholas Birns argues that ‘Clare is one of the great love poets of his or any age’, but only in reference to his poems on Mary Joyce. Theresa Kelley and Douglas Chambers have linked Clare's love of nature to his interest in botany, but in both cases the focus is on plants rather than love.