JOHN

See also:

• CLARE
• JOHN CLARE (1793-1864)
• CLARE, JOHN FITZGIBBON, 1ST EARL OF (1749-1802)

CLARE (1793-1864)  , English poet, commonly known as " the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet," the son of a farm labourer, was born at Helpstone near Peterborough, on the 13th of July 1793 . At the age of seven he was taken from school to tend sheep and geese; four years later he began to work on a farm, attending in the winter evenings a school where he is said to have learnt some algebra . He then became a pot-boy in a public-house and fell in love with Mary Joyce, but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade her to meet him . Subsequently he was gardener at Burghley Park . He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with gipsies, and worked as a lime burner in 1817, but in the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief . Clare had bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons out of his scanty earnings and had begun to write poems . In 1819 a bookseller at Stamford, named Drury, lighted on one of Clare's poems, The Setting Sun, written on a scrap of paper enclosing a note to his predecessor in the business . He befriended the author and introduced his poems to the notice of John Taylor, of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hussey, who issued the Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 182o . This book was highly praised, and in the next year his Village Minstrel and other Poems were published . He was greatly patronized; fame, in the shape of curious visitors, broke the tenor of his life, and the convivial habits that he had formed were indulged more freely . He had married in 1820, and an annuity of 15 guineas from Lord Exeter, in whose service he had been, was supplemented by subscription, and he became possessed of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned, but new wants made his income insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless . The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself .

As he worked again on the

fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill . Lord Fitzwilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home . Gradually his mind gave way . His last and best work, the Rural Musa (1835), was noticed by " Christopher North " alone . He had for some time shown symptoms of insanity; and in July 1837 he was removed to a private asylum, and afterwards to the Northampton general lunatic asylum, where he died on the loth of May 1864 . Clare's descriptions of rural scenes show a keen and loving appreciation of nature, and his love-songs and ballads charm by their genuine feeling; but his vogue was no doubt largely due to the interest aroused by his humble position in life . See the Life of John Clare, by Frederick Martin (1865) ; and Life and Remains of John Clare, by J . L . Cherry (1873), which, though not so complete, contains some of the poet's asylum verses and prose fragments .