And to Mr. Samuel Sefton of Derby, the grandson of Clare and one of his closest investigators, who has patiently and carefully responded to all our queries in a long correspondence, and who, besides informing us of the Clare tradition as it exists in the family, has supplied many materials of importance in writing the poet's life, special thanks are due. It was a fortunate chance that put us in communication with him. EDMUND BLUNDEN ALAN PORTER INTRODUCTION And he repulséd, (a short tale to make), Fell into a sadness; then into a fast; Thence to a watch; thence into a weakness; Thence to a lightness; and by this declension, Into the madness wherein now he raves. BIOGRAPHICAL The life of John Clare, offering as it does so much opportunity for sensational contrast and unbridled distortion, became at one time (like the tragedy of Chatterton) a favourite with the quillmen. Even his serious biographers have made excessive use of light and darkness, poetry and poverty, genius and stupidity: that there should be some uncertainty about dates and incidents is no great matter, but that misrepresentations of character or of habit should be made is the fault of shallow research or worse. We have been informed, for instance, that drink was a main factor in Clare's mental collapse; that Clare "pottered in the fields feebly"; that on his income of "£45 a year ... Clare thought he could live without working"; and all biographers have tallied in the melodramatic legend; "Neither wife nor children ever came to see him, except the youngest son, who came once," during his Asylum days. To these attractive exaggerations there are the best of grounds for giving the lie. John Clare was born on the 13th of July, 1793, in a small cottage degraded in popular tradition to a mud hut of the parish of Helpston, between Peterborough and Stamford. This cottage is standing to-day, almost as it was when Clare lived there; so that those who care to do so may examine Martin's description of "a narrow wretched hut, more like a prison than a human dwelling," in face of the facts. Clare's father, a labourer named Parker Clare, was a man with his wits about him, whether educated or not; and Ann his wife is recorded to have been a woman of much natural ability and precise habits, who thought the world of her son John. Of the other children, little is known but that there were two who died young and one girl who was alive in 1824. Clare himself wrote a sonnet in the _London Magazine_ for June, 1821, "To a Twin Sister, Who Died in Infancy."