“I found the poems in the fields and only wrote them down.”

Expressing his sense that poetry was discovered in lived experience rather than imposed upon it; the precise source is uncertain · Commonly attributed remark

John Clare

About John Clare

13 July 1793–20 May 1864

John Clare was born on 13 July 1793 in Helpston, a village then in Northamptonshire and now associated with Cambridgeshire, and died on 20 May 1864 in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. He came to be called the “peasant poet,” a phrase that helped sell his first books but also diminished him by making his social…

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