Helpston is a village in Cambridgeshire, England administered as part of the City of Peterborough. Cambridgeshire (abbreviated Cambs) is a county in England, bordering Lincolnshire to the north, Norfolk to the northeast, Suffolk to the east, Essex and Hertfordshire to the south, and Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire to the west. ... Motto: (French for God and my right) Anthem: God Save the King/Queen Capital London (de facto) Largest city London Official language(s) English (de facto) Unification - by Athelstan AD 927 Area - Total 130,395 km² (1st in UK) 50,346 sq mi Population - 2006 est. ... Peterborough is a city in the East of England. ...
The name 'Helpston' is though to have derived from helping to carry limestone to Peterborough from the neighbouring village of Barnack. It has a parish church named after St. Botolph. Barnack is a village and civil parish in the City of Peterborough unitary authority of Cambridgeshire, England. ...
John Clare the poet was born in Helpston in 1793. John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864) was an English poet, in his time commonly known as the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet, the son of a farm labourer, born at Helpston near Peterborough. ...
External links
A website about the village
Coordinates: 52°37′N 0°20′W Map of Earth showing lines of latitude (horizontally) and longitude (vertically), Eckert VI projection; large version (pdf, 1. ...
At the age of seven he was taken from school to tend sheep and geese; four years later he began to work on a farm, attending in the evenings a school where he is said to have learned algebra.
He remained free, mostly at home in Helpston, for the five months to follow, but eventually Patty called the Doctors in, between Christmas and New Year in 1841, and Clare was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum.
Clare's descriptions of rural scenes show a keen and loving appreciation of nature; his knowledge of the natural world went far beyond that of the major Romantic poets, and his love-songs and ballads charm by their genuine feeling.
If his poetry figures Helpston as a composite sign of all that was dear to him as a youth, it also documents with uncommon urgency the destruction of the fields, trees, and landmarks that gave Helpston its distinctive character and Clare a sense of identity.
That is, the poetry that insists upon the presence of Helpston as a stay and anchor of the poet's identity simultaneously marks the very disappearance of Helpston as Clare once knew it.
I choose to focus here on 'The Wish' and 'Helpstone' - both from the early Helpston period - because both poems present the utopian desires of a rustic genius as a transgressive dream or vision that is doomed to fail.
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