John Clare is sometimes referred to as 'England's natural poet' and his early works, Poems and Descriptions of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), The Village Minstrel (1821) and The Shepherd's Calendar (1827), continue to be praised for their complex and vivid evocation of the nation's rural landscape. The son of a farm labourer, Clare was self-taught and his poetry developed spontaneously from his enthusiasm for the countryside around the Northamptonshire village of his birth, a village that he remained almost pathologically attached to. A move to Northborough - a mere four miles from his native Helpstone - in 1832, coupled with lingering regrets over a love affair, is believed to have triggered the poet's mental collapse. Clare spent the last twenty years of his life in an asylum. He continued to write throughout his incarceration, charting his painful internal world in poems such as Invitation to Eternity and I am (I am: yet what I am none care or knows). Neglected for some time after his death, interest in his poetry was reignited by Edmund Blunden and C. Day-Lewis; more recently his life and work has been thoughtfully examined in a biography by Jonathan Bate.