OF all English poets in the core canon of our national verse, John Clare is perhaps the one with the most extraordinary life story. He was one of only two children to survive in a poor Northamptonshire family of rural labourers. That he became a poet at all is astonishing, given that his formal education ended by the time he was 12 years old. Yet the appearance of his Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820 brought huge, if brief success—only to be followed by decades of mental illness and the near-complete eclipse of his reputation.
Even the years of celebrity, when he mingled with the literary lions of his age, contained the seeds of subsequent decline. He may have been fêted as ‘the princely Clare’ by fellow writer Charles Lamb, but his wider audience knew him as the ‘Peasant Poet of Northamptonshire’. Such condescension extended to his editor, who freely intervened in Clare’s works on the assumption that
