In his social context, ‘peasant poet’ John Clare was not odd in being a constant reader of the ‘aristocrat poet’ Lord Byron. Even after the latter’s attacks in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers on ‘cobbler’ poets, along with all ‘sons of needless trade’ who might rhyme (‘weavers’, ‘taylors’, labourers with ‘plough’ or ‘spade’), Byron remained a leading influence on labouring-class poets’ work.1 Introducing his volume of labouring-class poetry of the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, Scott McEathron argues that along with Burns and Bloomfield, Byron loomed large for poor poets, including Clare:

Duncan Wu, meanwhile, gets fired up by the notion that Byron was taken up as a liberal hero3 – making a mistake as he does so, in assuming that myths and fantasies, public relations and public desire for heroes, are any less important than mere facts. To an extent, fine-grained decades-long reader of Byron though he was, Clare was caught up in that same mythology and idol-worship, as we shall see.