Lunatic, lover, poet: this is the definitive biography of John Clare. John Clare was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth or Shelley, and a life that was possibly the most extraordinary, and certainly the most moving, of them all. From rural Northamptonshire to literary London, from first love to delusions, depression and incarceration, Clare was haunted by ghosts from the past. In this, the first major biography of Clare, Jonathan Bate explores both the man and his madness, his work and his writing - poems, letters, even part of an autobiography - all of which show a mind plagued by demons and doubts, constantly questioning issues of identity, memory and, above all, loss.