Clare’s highly personal evocations of landscape and place are some of the most poignant lyrics in English poetry. His celebration of all forms of natural life and his laments for the death of rural England grew directly out of his intimate knowledge of the labourer’s life, the wheatfields and hedgerows of his village in Northamptonshire.

This authoritative and engaging selection includes poems from every stage of Clare’s poetic career, organised by theme, from ‘Birds and Beasts’ to ‘Madhouses, Prisons and Whorehouses’.