exertion?" Skrimshire entered: "After years of poetical prosing." His maintenance at the asylum was paid for by Earl Fitzwilliam, "but at the ordinary rate for poor people". He remained there for the rest of his life under the humane regime of Thomas Octavius Prichard, who encouraged and helped him to write. Here he wrote possibly his most famous poem, "I Am". It was in this later poetry that Clare "developed a very distinctive voice, an unmistakable intensity and vibrance, such as the later pictures of Van Gogh" possessed. John Clare died of a stroke on 20 May 1864 in his 71st year. His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph's churchyard, where he had expressed a wish to be buried. Remembrance On Clare's birthday, children at the John Clare School, Helpston's primary, parade through the village and place their "midsummer cushions" around his gravestone, which bears the inscriptions "To the Memory of John Clare The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" and "A Poet is Born not Made". Poetry In his time, Clare was commonly known as "the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". His formal education was brief, his other employment and class origins lowly. Clare resisted the use of the increasingly standardised English grammar and orthography in his poetry and prose, alluding to political reasoning in comparing "grammar" (in a wider sense of orthography) to tyrannical government and slavery, personifying it in jocular fashion as a "bitch". He wrote in Northamptonshire dialect, introducing local words to the literary canon such as "pooty" (snail), "lady-cow" (ladybird), "crizzle" (to crisp) and "throstle" (song thrush). In early life he struggled to find a place for his poetry in the changing literary fashions of the day. He also felt that he did not belong with other peasants. As Clare once wrote:"I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seemes careless of having anything to do with—they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose." It is common to see an absence of punctuation in Clare's original writings, although many publishers felt the need to remedy this in most of his work. Clare argued with his editors about