The trajectory of John Clare’s life sounds like that of a typical poet. Before he found fame, he was mocked by his peers for scribbling verse. He persisted and later won great acclaim only to fall out of fashion and later die in obscurity.
Who was John Clare?
But although his life followed the archetypal artist’s course, Clare was an original man with an unusual background.
Between stints at school, he was a plough-boy, a bird-scarer and a pot- scourer. He grew up in a cottage with no running water and continued to live there with his family, even when he became a famous literary figure.
Clare became a sensation in 1820, when Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, his first volume of poetry, was published. The 27-year-old was cannily marketed as ‘the peasant poet’ – an impoverished genius behind quaintly ungrammatical countryside verse.
Viewed as a novelty, Clare soon fell out of fashion and his poems languished in obscurity for 150 years. In the last two decades, however, he’s been rediscovered and championed by poets such as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Kathleen Jamie.
When was John Clare born?
Clare was not expected to survive when he was born in 1793 to a farm labourer and his barely literate wife. He survived but grew up to be barely 5ft tall.
When did John Clare start writing poetry?
Clare’s parents sent him to school as much as they could afford and he developed an obsessive hunger to learn and write. Set apart from his peers, Clare read in secret, in the woods and fields, and hid the poems he wrote on scrap paper.
As he worked in the fields close to his home village of Helpston, six miles from Stamford, Clare carefully observed the way insects flew and birds made their nests. Gradually, he formed the notion that he would like to publish his poetry. Always poor, his urgency for money grew when both his parents fell ill leaving the family in danger of being evicted.
When the first volume of Clare’s poetry was published in 1820 by John Taylor, who had discovered John Keats, Clare was hailed as a “genius” in The London Magazine.
It swiftly sold out and was reprinted three times that year. His biographer, Jonathan Bate, judges that Clare’s poetry improved with each of his three subsequent volumes but unfortunately each one sold less. Clare simply fell out of fashion.
He was simplistically viewed as a child of nature but the apparent naivety of his verse is deceptive and his writing has stood the test of time better than most 19th-century poets.
He had what the poet Jeremy Hooker calls “ditch vision” – a keen eye for tiny, everyday marvels. When Clare writes of “how sweet the sun-beam melts the crocus flower” or “sparrows chelp glad tidings from the eaves” you find yourself nodding in recognition. As Adam Foulds, the author of The Quickening Maze, a fascinating novel about Clare, wrote: “Our great poet of the present tense, he articulates in poems of quiet rapture the living moment.”
Clare’s writing is also a fascinating history of the era of Enclosure – when access to common land was cut off to many British people – and he’s been hailed as the first poet of eco protest. “Enclosure came and trampled on the grave/Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave... And birds and trees and flowers without a name/All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came.”
Clare felt estranged from his homeland by the enclosures, but his alienation ran deeper. When he went to London he discovered a raucous world of smart, boozy “cockney” literary figures and this bewildering experience left him feeling as though he no longer belonged at home either. Perhaps he hadn’t ever felt at home since his peers jeered that his desire to read and write was “lunacy”.
Why was John Clare in an asylum?
Those lunatic jibes were unintentionally prophetic. In 1837 Clare was admitted to an asylum in Epping Forest. He was delusional, believing himself to be the poet Byron and convinced he’d married his first love, Mary, as well as his wife, Patty. Despite this, he wrote some of his best poetry.
Clare’s biographer Jonathan Bate considers him to be not just a brilliant poet of the countryside but also of childhood and mental illness. “I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows/My friends forsake me like a memory lost:/I am the self-consumer of my woes”.
After four years in Epping, Clare ran away. He wrote a lucid, heartbreaking account of his four days walking home, at times so ravenous he ate grass. When back in Northamptonshire he was consigned to another asylum.
When did John Clare die?
After 23 years in this institution, he died, aged 70, in 1864. Clare’s illness may have been caused by malaria or bipolar disorder but it was aggravated by his sense of displacement – from his home, his family and the land he loved, so transformed by enclosure.
Clare would be even more distressed if he could see how industrial agriculture has stripped away much of his homeland. But hopefully he would be comforted that we have become better at appreciating his life and work. His previously unpublished poems are now in print and festivals are held to celebrate his writing. For all the fascination that surrounds his troubled life, it’s the joy in his descriptions that help us cherish the small glories still found in our countryside.
