John Clare was born in 1793, in the English village of Helpstone to Parker and Ann Stimson Clare. His father was a field laborer, and both of his parents were essentially illiterate. Clare received some schooling and learned basic reading and writing. While in school, he met Mary Joyce, with whom he shared a childhood romance. As an adult, he would look back on this relationship with more and more nostalgia, addressing numerous love poems to her in his late career. However, at the age of 12 he had to leave school to become a ploughboy. He received no further education.
While in school, Clare developed a love for literature, and began reciting poetry to his parents. Around the same time he left school, he began writing his own poetry. He would recite these poems as well, without telling his parents that they were his own work. He would gauge which of his poems were best based on his parents’ responses to these readings. Despite his interest in literature, Clare continued to work as a laborer until he reached adulthood. Then, at the age of 25, he met Edward Drury, a cousin of the London publisher John Taylor.
Taylor had previously published the work of John Keats, one of the most famous Romantic poets. Drury was excited by Clare’s poetry, and shared it with his cousin, who was similarly impressed. In 1820, he published Clare’s first collection, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. The collection went into four editions, and made Clare a favorite of London’s cultural elites, who were fascinated by the “peasant poet.”
Clare’s early poetry primarily focused on the countryside. Nature was a popular subject among many of the Romantic poets. However, these poets were middle or upper class, and most lived in the city. For them, nature was somewhere to escape the stress of modern life and industrialization. For Clare, however, the countryside was home. It was beautiful, but it was also part of the vast economic and social change that swept Britain in the nineteenth century.
For example, the nineteenth century saw the “enclosure” of much of the countryside. Peasants like John Clare’s family did not own land. Instead, they relied on “common land,” or land that was shared by everyone in the community, to graze their sheep and grow food. Enclosure was a process in which lands that had previously been held in common were seized by private landowners. Enclosure had been happening for centuries, but prior to the nineteenth century, Parliament had to approve each enclosure on an individual basis. All that changed in 1801 with the passage of the General Enclosure Act, which enabled any village to enclose the land as long as three-quarters of the landowners agreed. It was easy to win that majority, because enclosure vastly benefitted the landowners, who now got to keep all the profit that could be extracted from their holdings.
Although enclosure made farming more efficient, and more profitable for the landowners, it was extremely disruptive both for the community and the broader natural ecosystem. Many farmers who had worked the land for generations were evicted, and villagers who survived by raising animals on common land lost their source of income. Some who had once farmed for themselves became field laborers instead, earning starvation wages while raising the crops that would make the landowners even wealthier. Many others immigrated to the industrial cities, where they forced to accept low wages and poor conditions. The cities also lacked the tightly knit community that had been at the center of village life.
Clare’s poetry often memorialized country traditions that were rapidly disappearing in industrializing Britain. Along with the loss of community in the nineteenth century, Clare’s poetry was often driven by the destruction of the natural landscape during the period of industrialization. Enclosure was a major factor, as the consolidation of land holdings meant that wild spaces between small fields were cleared and land that had been kept for grazing, and thus was relatively biodiverse, was converted to high-intensity monoculture farmland. In Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, as well as his next book, The Village Minstrel, published in 1821, Clare displayed remarkable attention to the non-human world which fascinated city readers. Today, critics refer to the work featured in these two collections as Clare’s early period. GradeSaver has a ClassicNote guide for “The Badger,” a poem that embodies Clare’s clear-eyed focus on the realities of country life.
The Village Minstrel never achieved the success of Clare’s first volume. The poet did not publish another book until 1827, The Shepherd’s Calendar. The book was a reinterpretation of a poetry collection by the same name, written by the great sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spenser. Critics recognize the creativity and subtlety of Clare’s approach, but at the time it did not inspire much interest among the public. Clare’s final book was The Rural Muse, published in 1835. Today, the book is considered by many critics to mark the height of Clare’s career. It features his most experimental use of language, and some of the most sensitive nature poetry in the English language. We now call this Clare’s middle period. The poem “The Yellowhammer’s Nest,” part of a series of poems on bird’s nests, is an exemplary work from this period.
Despite the popularity of these poems today, they achieved little success in their time. Many wealthy Londoners were primarily interested in Clare as a curiosity—a link to a life of rural poverty they found fascinating. Though Clare enjoyed his early success, he felt increasingly uncomfortable with this form of attention, writing that he felt like a “peep show” for strangers. As he got older, Clare’s mental health began to decline. In 1837, he was admitted to High Beech Asylum. When he left in 1841, he was soon admitted to Northampton Lunatic Asylum, a higher security facility where he spent the rest of his life, eventually passing away in 1864 when he was 70 years old.
Throughout his time in the asylum, Clare continued to write poetry. Critics are somewhat divided on this work. Much of it is less innovative than his earlier work, including numerous generic love poems about his childhood crush Mary Joyce. However, he also wrote some powerful works about grief, nature, and the loss of self, including perhaps his most famous poem, “I Am!” These poems prove that although Clare had become paranoid and unstable in his sense of self, he remained both a master of the subtleties of language and a careful observer of both the world around him and his own psychology.
The year after Clare died, Frederick Martin published a biography of Clare, but his work did not become widely read until one hundred years after his death, when new editions of his poems began to be published. He became especially beloved by other poets, including John Ashbery, who wrote “For John Clare” in 1969. More recently, Clare’s work has inspired interest from scholars interested in environmental poetry. He has never achieved the fame of his contemporaries like William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Shelley. However, readers today find in Clare an especially prescient voice for our current environmental crisis, as his poetry models the possibility of a more loving and attentive relationship with the natural world.
