John Clare

John Clare (Helpston, 1793 – Northampton, 1864) was an English poet of the Romantic period. The son of a farm labourer, he is now regarded as one of the major poets of his generation and as a notable voice of the rural working class. His work was largely forgotten after his death and was not re-evaluated until the late twentieth century.

He grew up in poverty in a village in Northamptonshire. As a boy he tended geese and sheep in the fields and woods, and he attended school until he was twelve. At thirteen he read James Thomson's The Seasons and began writing verse of his own. His first book appeared in 1820, thanks to the Stamford bookseller Edward Drury, who passed his poems on to the London firm of Taylor & Hessey, which had published Keats. Reviewers were struck that such a talent had arrived in the plain clothes of a labourer. An annual annuity allowed him a degree of comfort for a time, but his income soon proved insufficient.

His poetry moves between love for the English countryside and grief at its disruption. He defended the open-field system against enclosure. He was torn between the literary world of London and the life of his neighbours, many of whom could not read, and money troubles were constant. His mental health declined over the years. In 1837 he entered a private asylum in Essex of his own accord, and in 1841 he was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. During his crises he believed he saw Mary Joyce, his first love, and he wrote poems to her.

His legacy is twofold: he recorded the English countryside from within, and he offered the testimony of a poet who wrote from manual labour and marginal life. He is now studied as one of the most distinctive voices of British Romanticism.