Clare was relatively forgotten in the later 19th century, but interest in his work was revived by Arthur Symons in 1908, Edmund Blunden in 1920 and John and Anne Tibble in their ground-breaking 1935 two-volume edition, while in 1949 Geoffrey Grigson edited Poems of John Clare's Madness (published by Routledge and Kegan Paul). Benjamin Britten set some of "May" from A Shepherd's Calendar in his Spring Symphony of 1948 and included a setting of The Evening Primrose in his Five Flower Songs.
Copyright on much of his work was claimed after 1965 by Professor Eric Robinson, the editor of the Complete Poetry,[31] but this has been contested. Some publishers such as Faber and Carcanet Press refused to acknowledge it.[32][33] Robinson died in 2019 and neither his widow nor his literary agent maintain his claim to own the copyright.[34]
The largest collection of original Clare manuscripts is held at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, where items are available to view by appointment. Other Clare papers are in public libraries in Northampton and New York.[34]
Altering what Clare actually wrote continued into the later 20th century. Helen Gardner, for instance, amended both the punctuation and the spelling and grammar when editing the New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950 (1972).
Since 1993, the John Clare Society of North America has organised an annual session of scholarly papers concerning John Clare at the annual Convention of the Modern Language Association of America.[35] In 2003 the scholar Jonathan Bate published the first major critical biography of Clare, which helped to keep up the revival in popular and academic interest.[36]
