John Clare became known during his lifetime as the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet. He has been anthologized in many poetry collections - he has four in the The Golden Treasury and the reader will discover in his poems a delightful musical metre, some quaint rhymes and marvellous descriptions of the natural world. Poetry poured out of him; he wrote hundreds, maybe thousands of poems during a life of poverty and toil.

He was the son of a farm labourer and although he had some schooling; going on to night school he was too poor to consider higher education and the professional world was closed to him. At night school he befriended the son of an excise man and the two of them spent their days roaming the countryside, living like hermits fishing and reading. This is from an early autobiographical poem:

And talked about the few books we bought
Though low in price you know their value well
And I thought nothing could their worth excel
And then we talked of what we wished to buy
And knowledge always kept our pockets dry

Clare could not stand the bondage of an apprenticeship and so he became an itinerant farm labourer, reading and writing furiously in his spare time. He found a bookseller willing to publish a few poems by subscription and resulting from this he found a publisher willing to print his first volume of poetry. In 1820 his Poems descriptive of rural life and scenery was published. It got favourable reviews and went to four editions. An example of his early poems:

Song #2

One gloomy eve I roamed about
Neath Oxey's hazel bowers,
While timid hares were darting out,
To crop the dewy flowers;
And soothing was the scene to me,
Right pleased was my soul,
My breast was calm as summer's sea
When waves forget to roll.

But short was even's placid smile,
My startled soul to charm,
When Nelly lightly skipt the stile,
With milk-pail on her arm:
One careless look on me she flung,
As bright as parting day;
And like a hawk from covert sprung,
It pounced my peace away.

Clare saw no money from his book and relied on grants and stipends from patrons to survive. He became a local celebrity and spent time in London in literary circles. His The Village Minstrel was published the following year but only sold moderately well. He felt cheated by his publisher and when he asked for a loan of £200 to buy some property he was told "A man should be ambitious, but remain in the state in which God had placed him" He returned to farm work, became ill and took to drinking trading on his celebrity status when possible. He was forced to seek poor relief to feed his wife and six children. In 1827 The Shepherds Calender was published, but there were few reviews and Clare became the forgotten poet. His mental health deteriorated and he started having hallucinations. He spent some time in a hostel paid for by his patron but he discharged himself and walked over 100 miles to his home. His mental health deteriorated further and a local doctor declared him insane and he was forcibly removed to the Northamptonshire asylum. here he was treated kindly and allowed to go out and was able to continue writing. He wrote poetry until he was too ill to do so.

Poems chiefly from manuscript was published in 1920. It contains an excellent and charming biography. There are some early poems and juvenilia, but the bulk of the poems are from Clare's middle period 1824-36 and there are some excellent poems here:

Night Wind

Darkness like midnight from the sobbing woods
Clamours with dismal tidings of the rain
Roaring as rivers breaking loose in floods
To spread and foam and deluge all the plain
The cotter listens at his door again
Half doubting whether it be floods or wind
And through the thickening darkness looks afraid
Thinking of roads that travel has to find
Through night's black depths in danger's garb arrayed
And the loud glabber round the flaze soon stops
When hushed to silence by a lifted hand
Of fearing dame who hears the noise in dread
And thinks a deluge comes to drown the land
Nor dares she go to bed until the tempest drops

Clare made his rhymes phonetically and because of his broad Northants accent there are some surprises in his rhyming schemes. He also used some words from his local dialect and the line from Nightwind above: "And the loud glabber round the flaze soon stops" is an example. You will not find glabber or flaze in the dictionary, but this does not stop you from enjoying the line that fits the poem so well.

The final section of the book features poems written in Northamptonshire asylum and they are on the whole surprisingly cheerful and colourful. Nature, the countryside of East Anglia are still the main subjects and Clare has not lost his musical ear. Here is the first four lines from Little Trotty Wagtail:

Little trotty wagtail he went in the rain
And tittering tottering sideways he neer got straight again
He stooped to get a worm, and looked up to get a fly
And he flew away ere his feathers they were dry.....

However one of the final poems in this collection hints at a quiet desperation:

I Am

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,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky

Clare's supporters would say that he ranks alongside the great romantic poets of his age: Shelly, Byron, Keats and Wordsworth etc... I don't think he has the depth or the weight to be in the first echelon. He does however have his own voice and as a gifted poet of the English countryside he is well worth reading ( )