Son of farm labourer. Northamptonshire Peasant Poet. Often absense of punctuation (corrected by editors). Celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. Nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self. Northamptonshire dialect.

His formal education was brief, his other employment and class-origins were lowly. Clare resisted the use of the increasingly standardised English grammar and orthography in his poetry and prose, alluding to political reasoning in comparing "grammar" (in a wider sense of orthography) to tyrannical government and slavery, personifying it in jocular fashion as a "bitch".

His knowledge of the natural world went far beyond that of the major Romantic poets. However, poems such as "I Am" show a metaphysical depth on a par with his contemporary poets and many of his pre-asylum poems deal with intricate play on the nature of linguistics. His "bird's nest poems", it can be argued, illustrate the self-awareness, and obsession with the creative process that captivated the romantics. Clare was the most influential poet, aside from Wordsworth, to practice in an older style.

I`m a self-taught English poet who was overlooked for years. My poems have made me now more popular than ever. When reading my verses, you may be surprised that I had only 11 years of formal education. Read me and take courage! Let not high or low degrees of schooling hinder you from expressing yourself poetically....John Clare`s life spanned one of the great ages of English poetry but, until about fifty years ago, few would have thought of putting his name with those of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning and Tennyson.

Born in 1793 to humble and almost illiterate parents, Clare grew up in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston and made the surrounding countryside his world. His formal education, such as it was, ended when he was eleven years old, but this child of the `unwearying eye` had a thirst for knowledge and became a model example of the self-taught man. As a poet of rural England he has few rivals.

During his long life, Clare observed a period of massive changes in both town and countryside. The Agricultural Revolution - The Enclosures - saw pastures ploughed up, trees and hedges uprooted, marshy land drained and the common land enclosed.  This destruction of the countryside he knew as a child and the centuries-old way of life it supported, distressed Clare deeply. Large numbers of agricultural labourers, including their children, went to work in the new factories because of the rural poverty caused by the greed of landowners and farmers, which kept wages down but forced prices up. For them, it was migration to the town, or die.  Clare recorded much of this in his poems and prose.

From the moment his first publication - Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery - appeared in 1820, it was clear that England had a new and original poet. Sadly, the public`s enthusiasm did not last long and each new volume met with diminishing applause. Ill and in debt, he left Helpston for Northborough and, at the encouragement of his editor, John Taylor, was then committed to a private asylum, High Beach in Epping Forest, in 1837.  Leaving the asylum in 1841, he made the long trek on foot back to his home where he spent a few months before eventually being removed to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum in which he died in 1864.