Jack Clemo's poetry is more often seen as a triumph against affliction than a literary success. His handicaps--physical, educational, social--have served, in place of criticism, as the measure of his art. Clemo has vigorously opposed this tendency and insisted, as in "Affirmative Way":

The insight, the forced dream,
The theory, which a cripple shapes
To train, sustain, explain himself,
Falls sterile and untested.

Despite this insistence, courageous is the epithet most commonly applied to his work, which still awaits sustained critical evaluation.

Reginald John Clemo was born in the tiny Cornish clay-quarrier's cottage he inhabits to this day. His father, Reginald, after an unsuccessful attempt to make his fortune in America, had settled back into the quarriers' village of St. Austell in 1912 and married Eveline Polmounter, the daughter of a local Nonconformist preacher. The marriage was disastrous and short-lived. Reginald Clemo was conscripted into the war effort in...