John Clare is the quintessential Romantic poet. As an agricultural laborer, he lived in the closest communion with nature possible for civilized man. At the same time he acquired as little formal education as one could have and survive as a literary man; he was steeped in the oral tradition of ballads and songs. Isolated for the most part from urban life, he was highly intelligent and sensitive, so much so that he learned better than any of his contemporaries the truth of William Wordsworth's words: "We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness." Out of the gladness and the despondency he produced a large body of work, which carries on many of the traditions he inherited from his family--his father was an illiterate singer of songs and ballads--and the village life around him, but which also contains a...