May 20, 1864 –
Poet John Clare (70) dies peacefully in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum where he had been living his last 23 years. Due to his background and his knowledge of nature, in his own time he was known as “The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet”.
Originally an uneducated farmhand, as a successful poet he had felt out of place everywhere: not at home among simple villagers anymore, but not at home among his more refined reader public either.
Besides deep depressions he also suffered from periods of delusion: thinking he was Shakespeare or Byron, he had set about rewriting their poetry.
One of his best known poems, I Am, written in the asylum shortly before he died, expressed loneliness and a longing for both the innocence of childhood and the blissful emptiness of death.