Excerpt from John Clare: Poems Chiefly From Manuscript The life of John Clare, offering as it does so much opportunity for sensational contrast and unbridled distortion, became at one time (like the tragedy of Chatterton) a favourite with the quillmen. Even his serious biographers have made excessive use of light and darkness, poetry and poverty, genius and stupidity: that there should be some uncertainty about dates and incidents is no great matter, but that misrepresentations of character or of habit should be made is the fault of shallow research or worse. We have been informed, for instance, that drink was a main factor in Clare's mental collapse that Clare pottered in the fields feebly that on his income of GBP45 a year Clare thought he could live with out working and all biographers have tallied in the melodramatic legend Neither wife nor children ever came to see him, except the youngest son, who came once, during his Asylum days. To these attractive exaggerations there are the best of grounds for giving the lie. John Clare was born on the 13th of July, 1793, in a small cottage degraded in popular tradition to a mud hut of the parish of Help ston, between Peterborough and Stamford. This cottage is standing to-day, almost as it was when Clare lived there so that those who care to do so may examine Martin's description of a narrow wretched hut, more like a prison than a human dwelling, in face of the facts. Clare's father, a labourer named Parker Clare, was a man with his Wits about him, whether educated or not; and Ann his wife is recorded to have been a woman of much natural ability and precise habits, who thought the world of her son John. Of the other children, little is known but that there were two who died young and one girl who was alive in 1824. Clare himself wrote a sonnet in the London Magazine for June, 1821, To a Twin Sister, Who Died in Infancy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.