Yet, even so, his spiritual strength, his peasant resilience, were such that at times he could transform these tensions into the penetrating eloquence and achieved, stabilizing form of song, of lyric, of elegy, making resonant harmony out of radical discord. And his more extended later poems, written by or through a Byronic persona — such poems derive considerable energy and power from an often savage dialogue between hope and despair, memory and desire, what might have been and what was.

Salient moments in his life’s wretched chronology include: 1820 and 1821, the publication of his first two volumes; 1820, 1822, 1824, his visits to London to meet the literary lions and to be both honoured and patronized as a ‘green man’; 1824-7, his struggles with Taylor, his publisher, to agree on publishing his Shepherd’s Calendar; 1832, his enforced move from Helpstone, his birthplace, to Northborough; 1835, publication of his Rural Muse; 1837-41, his term in High Beech Lunatic Asylum, Epping Forest; 1841, his escape, followed by his removal to Northampton Asylum; 1841-64, his confinement at Northampton.

 

Clare was born in Helpstone, midway between Peterborough and Stamford, near Peterborough Great Fen. His mother was illiterate; his father, barely literate, had a good repertoire of folk-songs. According to the law of averages, Clare should have become an agricultural labourer, earning a bare subsistence wage, and in possession, at best, of a merely functional literacy.

Aroused, however, by oral tales and chapbook romances, he early became an avid reader; and when he was thirteen, his reading of Thompson’s Seasons excited him so intensely that he began to write verse. When he had learned to read and write, he had become something of an exception: when he committed himself to writing poetry, he became an anomaly.

Still a boy, he set to earn his living by selling the labour of his hands: he worked variously as a ploughboy, as a reaper and thresher, a jobbing-gardener, and at lime-burning. And while still a young man, he fell in love with Mary Joyce, a local farmer’s daughter. Their relationship ended around 1816, seemingly at the insistence of her father. Clare was to be haunted by her ‘presence’ almost to his dying day.

In 1820, as a result of some fortunate contacts, his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published; he visited London and, through his publisher, John Taylor, met many literary figures; and he married Patty Turner, who was already six months pregnant with their child. His book quickly went into four editions, and he became a nine-days’ wonder.

His second volume, The Village Minstrel, appeared in 1821, and two years later he began to plan a long, ambitious poem, The Shepherd’s Calendar, which appeared after many frustrations and delays in 1827. His health first showed signs of serious trouble in 1823, and from then on he was visited by bouts of severe melancholy, severe doubt and hopelessness. His emotional/ nervous afflictions have been posthumously subjected to various analyses; the most plausible diagnosis seems to be a manic-depressive condition in which he became periodically psychotic.

In 1828, he paid his fourth visit to London; in 1830, a sixth child was born; and in 1830 and 1831 he again suffered a severe and prolonged illness. Friends and patrons joined in a well-meaning scheme for his relief, which involved moving him and his family to a more commodious cottage, with a modest smallholding, in the village of Northborough, about two and a half miles - as the crow flies - from Helpstone, and about three and a half miles by road.

His work up to about 1825 is predominately a prolific series of celebrations of delight in perceiving and representing natural life, and an exploration of the relationships of a hardworking lowly human society to its rural environment and the cycle of the year, with its swing between benign summer and bleak winter.

‘What are days for?’ asked Philip Larkin in a celebrated poem. ‘Days are where we live ... They are to be happy in ...’ Clare’s representations of his days and seasons, times and places, appear to endorse Larkin’s conclusion. The microcosm of the moment, like the macrocosm of the season - each is celebrated as offering its own distinctive satisfactions, and in his earlier poetry Clare seems to be possessed by the particular vividness of moments and of local places. As Tim Chilcott has remarked, these poems construct and mediate a vivid sense of presentness and of simultaneity. Their achievements, their numbers and their effects can be summed up in one word: plenitude. Given his acutely responsive - and appreciative - sensibility, there was always something worthy of his keenest attention.

Structurally, most of his earlier poems are relatively simple, especially in their syntax, which lies closer to the rhythms of a speaking voice than to those of prose: their subtlety and richness are to be found, not in a sophisticated syntax, but in an intimately absorbed attentiveness to commonplaces - the ordinary is embraced and transformed by the intensity of attention into the extraordinary - and in a stubborn belief in the mimetic sufficiency of ordinary local language, a dialect which registered a special acuity of perception in the realm of elemental sensation. The relationships between word and world appear to be perfectly harmonious and unstrained, as if that which Clare perceived could speak with its own voice.

For over twenty-six years, the constraints of the sonnet and of the rhyming couplet provided Clare with two of his most congenial and elastic frames; and as he became well-versed in the seventeenth-century poets, on some of whom he fathered some of his own poems, and drew more deeply and more surely on English folk-song, so he developed his own distinctive lyricism, and reaffirmed spoken song as one of the distinctive gifts of the English-speaking poetic genius.

By 1832, some difficult truths had shaken Clare’s delicate and vulnerable sensibility: very early he had made the crucial and irreversible shift from a primarily oral culture to a literate and literary culture. But even as his work was in fact published, meeting with a confusing variety of responses from his readers, the integrity of his vision and of his native language was challenged and compromised by well-meaning friends, patrons and editors, and he continued inescapably to live among people to whom poetry was a closed book. His own wife could not share his life as a poet, and Mary Joyce had been absent from his life for over ten years but continued obsessively to engage his deepest and most intense feelings, an emblem of what might have been.

All aspects of his experience, all his social and literary relationships, served to enforce his sense of having left familiar ground yet of not having securely arrived somewhere else; he discovered himself to be adrift, in limbo, an anomalous and wrong-footed misfit: liminal man, in no man’s land, stuck at some kind of threshold, unable to go either back or forward. Even his sacral landscape had proved impermanent, despoiled often beyond recognition by the ‘improvements’ of enclosure.

Such was Clare’s predicament, in which the move to Northborough proved to be the last straw: an intended amelioration of his plight merely served to exacerbate his sense of alienation. In June 1837, little improved by the appearance of The Rural Muse (1835), he was taken to Dr Matthew Allen’s private asylum at High Beech in Epping Forest. He spent just over four years there; his physical health improved considerably, but his mental condition showed little change. He resolved the matter for himself by running away — escaping — in July 1841, and walked all the way to Northborough in search of ‘home’ and in the hope of being reunited with his ‘first wife’, Mary Joyce. She had died, a spinster, in 1838: when his family told him of this, he did not believe them.

After five months with his family, ‘homeless at home’, he was removed in December 1841 — he was allowed to wait until after Christmas but was taken before he could say, or hear, ‘A Happy New Year’ - to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. There he was treated humanely and allowed generous freedom of movement until his misbehaviour resulted in confinement to the asylum grounds. He died there, 20 May 1864, and was buried at Helpstone five days later.

In 1832, Clare was midway in his life as a poet; under the various stresses and limits of his circumstances, his poetry was undergoing a deep change. No longer could he find a seemingly inexhaustible delight in the ‘eternal recurrence of common order’; no longer did he find himself ‘rapt with satisfied attention ... to the mere spectacle of the world’s presence — one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one’s sense of its unfathomable significance’; no longer was he able to believe that ‘life is always worth living if one have ...