John Clare

John Clare (1793–1864) was an English labouring-class poet, the son of a Northamptonshire farm labourer, whose closely observed poems of birds, insects and the vanishing open fields of his native Helpston mark him as one of the great nature poets in the language.

His early success gave way to poverty and the destruction of the rural world he wrote from, as the enclosure acts fenced in the commons he had grown up roaming. He spent the last decades of his life in asylums, where he continued to write some of his most haunting poems, including "I Am."