Born 13 July 1793, John Clare was the son of Parker Clare, a thresher and local wrestler, and Ann in the village of Helpston, Northamptonshire. Clare mourned the death of his twin sister who had died only weeks after her birth. Keen that Clare should be literate (his mother was illiterate and his father had slight education), his parents sent him to school, when he wasn’t required to work on the land, until he was twelve. His early meeting with Mary Joyce at school became, as did nature and his locale, a key subject of his poetry, as Clare fell deeply in love with the younger girl.
A keen devourer of poetry, chapbooks, and oral ballads and folklore, Clare began to write original poetry. Though apprenticed at fourteen to a local cobbler and then to a stonemason, Clare did not take to the work, and moved between various occupations before enlisting and serving briefly as a soldier during the Napoleonic Wars. Clare’s earliest poetry was written informally on scraps of paper for his parents, but by 1814 he began to keep his poetry collected in a manuscript book. Though Clare entered into a publishing arrangement in 1817 to publish some of his poems by subscription, the project never took off, but meeting Edward Drury, a Stamford bookseller, changed his fortune. Soon the publishers Taylor and Hessey took up Clare’s cause; they published his Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820, and its success propelled him to some celebrity. Feted by Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge, and many others, Clare had every reason to assume that he had become a part of the literary establishment. He had recently married his pregnant girlfriend, Martha Turner, a milkmaid, and Clare’s poetic success offered welcome income and fame to the young couple. His second collection, The Village Minstrel, was published in 1820 and went into a second edition in 1821, but it failed to achieve the acclaim of his first collection and sales were relatively low. However, it was the failure of The Shepherd’s Calendar, published in 1827 after six years of silence, that devastated Clare. Father of a growing family (Clare and his wife would have nine children), he worked hard at his poetry and writing, but his work as a part‐time labourer did not provide enough income and his health was increasingly poor. Despite the assistance of his friends, E. T. Artis and J. Henderson, in setting him up as an independent farmer, Clare’s lack of business sense and declining mental and physical health saw this bid for financial improvement fail. His final poetry collection, The Rural Muse, came out in 1835 to little fanfare. By 1837, he took his publisher John Taylor’s advice and chose to enter an asylum. He remained there until he escaped in 1841, but six months later, in Northborough, Clare was committed to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Possessed by delusions, depression, and insomnia, Clare imagined he was, in fact, Lord Byron, and also Robert Burns, among others, but continued to compose poetry. He wandered around Northampton by permission of his doctors, and died in the asylum in 1864. Clare is increasingly acknowledged as a fine lyric poet, whose poetry reveals an intense engagement with nature and, as our account in ‘Readings’ shows, with identity, emotion, and memory.
Eric H. Robinson, ‘Clare, John (1793–1864)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5441, accessed 3 September 2015]; Duncan Wu, ‘John Clare (1793–1864)’, in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th edn (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), p. 1271.