John Clare

From the
http://www.johnclare.org.uk/                website


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, the son of 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.