This thesis is a study of Clare’s poetry in light of recent developments in particular Marxist ecological thought, to offer an historicist reading of poetic form in Clare, and along the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a greater ecological focus. I think that there is value to be found in the intersection between historical materialism and an expanded ecocriticism with a more rigorously historicist bent, and in particular applying this framework to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and poetics and in particular the work of John Clare. Indeed, Clare is a poet who has been embraced by the expanding field of ecocriticism in literary study, and the intention of my thesis is to give a reading of Clare that contributes to this field with a harder historicist edge to the significance of ecology and the environment not only in Clare’s work but particularly in his form. This thesis therefore offers an historicist account of the development of Clare’s prosody and use of different poetic forms specifically in relation to his response to the change in both environments and ecology, and in the division of labour and its practices. To this effect, I am arguing for a renewed sensibility to Clare’s own clear concept not only of poetic labours but of the poetic forms that are the product of those labours and how these interact with the same seismic shifts that transform agricultural and wage labour in the early nineteenth century, which challenge what it means to live and reproduce the self. Foundational to these readings of Clare’s approach to form therefore are the keywords labour and nature. In the introduction I show how these terms have in works of political economy and theory been thought through together to better understand the history of our transforming relationship to ecology and the environment, in particular in Karl Marx and in Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘labour’ which draws on Marx’s earlier ecological thought. I then go on to show how this in turn is pertinent to my reading of Clare’s poetry. Having laid these foundations in my introduction, the four chapters of this thesis focus on particular poetic devices and forms in light of my argument that for Clare labour and nature are mutually constituted and must be thought through together in his poetical depictions of either.