John Clare: A Biography By Jonathan Bate

Roy Hattersley is moved by the story of the labourer-poet who wrestled with madness

I am not sure if Jonathan Bate has written a beautiful book or if he has written a book about a beautiful subject. Perhaps his biography of John Clare qualifies for both descriptions. However it is described, it is a joy to read and a necessary part of a civilised education. Clare is one of those poets about whom we all know something but few of us know very much. Bate provides a fascinating insight into a man for whom poetry was, like his life, a mixture of discord and harmony. It is an adventure story which proclaims the victory of art over adversity.

The Northampton beginnings were both rural and Arcadian. As a boy he kept a tame sparrow and enjoyed regular visits from a friendly robin. In adult life, he graduated to doves. It was all a part of his communion with nature - a partnership which was strengthened by his early occupation tending cows and horses, before he achieved the status of "temporary kitchen garden apprentice" at Burghley House. He was in awe, or later claimed to be in awe, of the head gardener whom he mistook for a gentleman.

The early simplicity of his life is emphasised by the compelling simplicity of Jonathan Bate's prose. A more self-conscious author, anxious about his reputation in sophisticated society, would never write: "Boys are always having accidents - especially in the country. Here are some of them." I do not suggest that, in the early years of the 19th century, Clare would have made the point in identical language. But Bate certainly writes in the spirit of his subject.

Clare was not so much self-educated as led towards literature and learning by rural acquaintances and friends. For a young man whose formal education was rudimentary, his reading was extraordinarily eclectic. He read Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield each winter and was, significantly, always disappointed by the happy ending. Hill's Family Herbal excited his interest in the naming and classification of plants. Milton's Paradise Lost inspired him. Robert Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy (which sold 26,000 copies in three years) convinced him that an agricultural labourer could write a book which people wanted to read. But his poetry was always original rather than derivative. He wrote in his autobiography, "I always wrote my poems in the fields and when I was out of work, I used to go out of the village to particular spots which I was fond of from the beauty or secrecy of the scene..." He loved Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler because he could "almost hear the water of the river Lea ripple along", and he wrote in that spirit.

It was not only beauty and secrecy which inspired him. Some of the poems which made his name - "Helpstone" and "A Rustic's Pastime" - lament the consequences of the enclosures. One of the strengths of Bate's biography is the way in which it sets an exceptional man in his time and place. Clare was a profoundly complex man. The biography does not always explain the origins of those complexities, but it describes them with remarkable clarity: the drinking, the sexual promiscuity and the strange ambivalence about the rival attractions of fame and anonymity.

Clare is almost as famous for his mental illness as for his poetry. He was confined in what was then called an asylum in 1837 "by the authority of his wife". By the standards of the time, it was a progressive, indeed benign, institution but Clare found his four- year imprisonment purgatory. So he walked out and walked home - 100 miles in four days. After arriving home, he cuddled his children and went to bed early. But his illusions continued. He was unsure who his true wife was, and certain that he was Lord Byron. He had not completed his extra stanzas for Childe Harold when he was certified a second time and admitted to Northampton Lunatic Asylum.

Lives of the poets fascinate - especially if they are as star-crossed and complicated as John Clare's. But a poet's biography must stand or fall by the treatment of the poetry. We would no more have heard of John Clare had he merely been a rustic lunatic than we would know about Lord Byron had he only been a dissolute and deviant aristocrat. Bate pays the poetry proper attention and respect.

It is The Shepherd's Calendar for which Clare is rightly best known: a collection of poems which, Bate tells us, required much pruning by the publishers. Perhaps he anticipated and accepted the need for editing.

My wild field catalogue of flowers

Grows in my rhymes as thick as showers

Tedious and long as they may be

To some, they never weary me.

They do not weary me. But then I find a strange attraction in one aspect of Clare's life as well as most of his poetry. He briefly achieved fame as the "peasant poet" - not the overnight sensation which Byron enjoyed but enough to be regarded, alongside Hood and Lamb, as one of the star contributors to the London Magazine. Yet throughout the years of success - including a period of luxurious patronage by Earl Spencer - he was all too aware that he felt more at ease when he was at home in the countryside he knew and loved. His occasional excursion into the vernacular was an expression of affection, not an admission of rural illiteracy. During his final illness, his most repeated cry was "I want to go home." The beauty of John Clare: A Biography is its understanding of that poignant message.