It’s the birthday of the peasant poet John Clare (1793-1864), who after early success fell out of fashion, was disappointed in love, experienced financial hardships, and spent about 27 years in insane asylums. (NB: It’s true that a lot of the great poets die young, but I think the insane asylums more than make up for this lack.)

Clare was born in the village of Helpston, Peterborough, England, and if you google it you will see there’s now a John Clare Primary School there. He was the son of peasants who could barely read, but he did receive some education even while working on a farm from the age of seven. He read a great deal on his own (he loved Robinson Crusoe) and fell in love with a school girl, Mary Joyce; he later dedicated much of his poetry to her.

His first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), was his most successful, and he was briefly in fashion. He married Martha “Patty” Turner that same year. After that, his poems got better and better but sold worse and worse and he had to work as a laborer. He ultimately produced three more books of poetry (The Village Minstrel, 1821; The Shepherd’s Calendar, 1827; The Rural Muse, 1835) and seven children and began to show signs of being delusional. In 1836 or 1837 he entered High Beech asylum, where he had enough freedom to write poetry, stroll the grounds, and just up and leave four years later. He walked all the way home, which was a four day trip; he ate grass along the way to survive. Five months later he was committed to the Northampton Lunatic Asylum where he spent the remaining 23 years of his life, producing some of his most beautiful work, including Don Juan, Child Harold, and many love poems to Mary Joyce and other women. (Heartbreaking. One wants to transport him to modern times and set him up with some decent health insurance and a terrific team of doctors.)

Clare was rediscovered in the 20th century; poetryfoundation.org says, “His works gorgeously illuminate the natural world and rural life.”

Clare’s poem “Summer” begins:

Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,

For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom,

And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,

And love is burning diamonds in my true lover’s breast…

(Read the whole thing here.)

Have a lovely and lyrical Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.