"No one sang the blues like mad John Clare"

From a book review of a new John Clare bio and selected poems in the New York Times; an mq:

In the Romantic era, when nature was an object of reverence, a rustic bard like Clare was a highly marketable commodity. Whatever the 19th-century rural equivalent of street cred was, he had it. He was born in a small village called Helpston, raised by a farm-laborer father and an illiterate mother, and schooled sporadically; until the time of his unlikely success as a poet, he had earned his meager living by casual, seasonal agricultural work and such humble trades as lime burning and, briefly, soldiering. He liked to compose rhymes in his head when he was out in the fields, though, and would write them down later, if he could find any paper. If he couldn't, Bate tells us, he would sometimes peel bark off trees and write his verses on that. How authentic can you get?

Link: 'John Clare': Nature Boy By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Additional Link: John Clare's Poetry On-line