John Clare
born July 13, 1793, Helpston, near
Peterborough, Northamptonshire, Eng.
died May 20, 1864, Northampton, Northamptonshire
English peasant poet of the Romantic school.
Clare was the son of a labourer and began work
on local farms at the age of seven. Though he
had limited access to books, his poetic gift,
which revealed itself early, was nourished by
his parents’ store of folk ballads. Clare was an
energetic autodidact, and his first verses were
much influenced by the Scottish poet James
Thomson. Early disappointment in love—for Mary
Joyce, the daughter of a prosperous farmer—made
a lasting impression on him.
In 1820 his first book, Poems Descriptive of
Rural Life and Scenery, was published and
created a stir. Clare visited London, where he
enjoyed a brief season of celebrity in
fashionable circles. He made some lasting
friends, among them Charles Lamb, and admirers
raised an annuity for him. That same year he
married Martha Turner, the daughter of a
neighbouring farmer, the “Patty of the Vale” of
his poems. From then on he encountered
increasing misfortune. His second volume of
poems, The Village Minstrel (1821), attracted
little attention. His third, The Shepherd’s
Calendar; with Village Stories, and Other Poems
(1827), though containing better poetry, met
with the same fate. His annuity was not enough
to support his family of seven children and his
dependent father, so he supplemented his income
as a field labourer and tenant farmer. Poverty
and drink took their toll on his health. His
last book, The Rural Muse (1835), though praised
by critics, again sold poorly; the fashion for
peasant poets had passed. Clare began to suffer
from fears and delusions. In 1837, through the
agency of his publisher, he was placed in a
private asylum at High Beech, Epping, where he
remained for four years. Improved in health and
driven by homesickness, he escaped in July 1841.
He walked the 80 miles to Northborough,
penniless, eating grass by the roadside to stay
his hunger. He left a moving account in prose of
that journey, addressed to his imaginary wife
“Mary Clare.” At the end of 1841 he was
certified insane. He spent the final 23 years of
his life at St. Andrew’s Asylum, Northampton,
writing, with strangely unquenched lyric
impulse, some of his best poetry.
His rediscovery in the 20th century was begun
by Arthur Symons’s selection of 1908, a process
continued by Edward Thomas and Edmund Blunden at
a date when World War I had revived the earlier
enthusiasm for a poetry of directly apprehended
rustic experience.
