Background
Clare John was the son of a farm labourer, was born at Helpstone near Peterborough, on the 13th of July 1793.
Clare John was the son of a farm labourer, was born at Helpstone near Peterborough, on the 13th of July 1793.
Clare John's early schooling was meager, supplemented by his father's and mother's ballads, the Bible, chapbooks, and penny broadsheets hawked in those days from door to door.
Clare John began to work on a farm, attending in the winter evenings a school where he is said to have learnt some algebra. By the time he was 13, inspired by James Thomson's The Seasons, Clare had begun to write poetry.
Clare John enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with gipsies, and worked as a lime burner in 1817, but in the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief. Clare had bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons out of his scanty earnings and had begun to write poems.
He continued to live in rural isolation at Helpstone, dividing his time between agricultural work and the writing of poetry. His poetic aim matured.
The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself.
Gradually his mind gave way.
His last and best work, the Rural Muse (1833), was noticed by " Christopher North " alone.
In 1838 Clare became subject to delusions and was confined at High Beech, a mental institution in Essex.
He escaped in 1841 and walked the 80 miles (129 km) home to Northamptonshire, eating grass to appease his hunger.
Clare's descriptions of rural scenes show a keen and loving appreciation of nature, and his love-songs and ballads charm by their genuine feeling; but his vogue was no doubt largely due to the interest aroused by hie humble position in life. See the Life of John Clare, by Frederick Martin (1865); and Life and Remains of John Clare, by J. L. Cherry (1873), which, though not so complete, contains some of the poet's asylum verses and prose fragments.