Am 13. Juli 1793 wurde John Clare in Nottinghamshire, England geboren. Früh mußte er auf Kosten der Schulbildung für den Lebensunterhalt der Familie beitragen. 1820 veröffentlichte er sein erstes Buch, „Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), von „John Clare, a Nottinghamshire peasant.“ Der Writers‘ Almanac schreibt:
He drank too much, started to lose his mind, and was sent to an insane asylum. In 1841 he escaped and walked 80 miles back to his home, eating grass by the roadside along the way because he was so hungry. Eventually he was sent back to another asylum, where he spent the last 23 years of his life, believing he was Lord Byron or Robert Burns, and writing some of his best work.
Darunter war das berühmte Gedichte „I am“:
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
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