Like Robert Burns, Clare was the son of a farming family, and did agricultural labor during much of the first half of his life; when he published his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), he gained some fame as “The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet.” He could not make a living sufficient for his large family, however, and relied on patrons and friends. By the mid-1830s he had become delusional (claiming to have been both Shakespeare and Byron, for example), and was confined to an asylum for most of his remaining years. Clare knew the countryside as well as any poet of his day; his poems deal with hundreds of different birds and beasts, many of them acutely observed, and with the losses to rural life brought about by land enclosures.