I have a confession to make, and it is one that is likely to see me condemned from all quarters! I never normally make posts that are negative towards any other poet, but this gentleman has been dead for about two centuries now, and is in any case very highly regarded, seemingly by everyone, and I'm making this not to attack but in the hope that someone, somewhere, can enlighten me and show me where I have been going wrong.

My confession is ... I do not like the poetry of John Clare.

For seventeen years I have racked my brains over the supposed brilliance of Clare's writing, but, give or take the occasional short poem, I am afraid I find his work, even by the standards of his era, to be simplistic, plodding, and unimaginative. It's true he looks at nature with a child's sense of wonder, and gives a voice to many of the unsung flora and fauna of the British countryside, and that his poems often argue against industrialization, animal cruelty and other problems. But I simply find it to be dully written. He repeats the same words and phrases in ways that look clumsy and inattentive, as if he never bothered to read many of his own poems after writing the first draft, the adjectives he employs are barely ever anything other than commonplace and cannot have required any thought or inspiration, nor do they enliven the brain or encourage us to see nature in any new ways, and his rhymes are often awful - utterly predictable and more like the equivalent of "Clinton's Cards rhymes" than the level of genius with which many commentators (including many great poets) have credited him. He is often cited as one of Britain's greatest poets, or as an example of someone untainted by the pretension of the literary world, but if anything I think his poetry is a bad example of this, and a good example of why natural talent can go to waste if not nurtured and helped along by those with more experience and a wider outlook. Clare was obviously a man of high intelligence and instinctively tuned in to the world around him, but much of his poetry just seems careless.
I realize it is often seen as somehow radical or subversive to write poetry that is full of bad grammar and wrongly spelt words, but I'm fairly sure Clare wasn't doing this for the sake of irony or modernism - he often spells a word several different ways in the same poem, and reading his work can be more like reading a hastily written series of sloppily dashed out notes.
Can anybody honestly tell me that they sit and read Clare for pleasure, and gain the same heightened sense of joy or emotion, or intellectual fulfillment, that they get from reading Coleridge, or Hughes, or Heaney, or Kathleen Raine? Or is it just that we are told that he is brilliant, but very few people actually sit down and read his work by choice? If I have missed something, please enlighten me, so that I might finally grasp what it is about this poetry that seems to stimulate seemingly every poet besides myself.