For the first time in nearly 180 years, this is a book that presents, side by side, two major versions of one of John Clare's most celebrated poems, "The Shepherd's Calendar". The final manuscripts of the poem that Clare composed are placed against t...

"A Champion for the Poor" brings together for the first time John Clare's longest poem, "The Parish" – in a new and corrected text – and his forceful satires "The Hue & Cry" and "The Summons". Some previously unpublished poems are included, too. Ther...

John Clare was a defining voice of the rural poetic tradition. His story was first set down more than two centuries ago and has captured the imagination of the reading public ever since. it is told most vividly and poignantly in Clare's own words. T...

John Clare was an assiduous practitioner of the sonnet form at all periods of his poetic career. The sonnets he produced in the last few years before his institutionalisation in 1837, fist at High Beech and then in Northampton General Asylum, are of...

John Clare (1793-1864): Born the son of a thresher at Helpston, Northamptonshire, John Clare is a rural poet and story teller. He is a poet of spiritual originality, as compelling at his best as Crabbe and Wordsworth as a story teller in verse. He wa...

Clare records that it was "a very old custom among villagers in summer time to stock a piece of greensward full of field flowers & place it a an ornament in their cottages which ornaments are called Midsummer Cushions". This "cottage custom" suggeste...