He was fortunate that there was a thriving local publishing industry — the nearby town of Stamford had an unexpectedly rich cultural life, partly because it was on the main coaching route to London. In 1820, Clare's first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published, followed the next year by The Village Minstrel and other Poems. His publisher, John Taylor, brought him to London, where he was fêted and had his portrait painted — he looks uncomfortable in his Sunday finery. A clever marketing campaign branded him as "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Comparisons with Burns were made explicit in the press coverage.

Clare enjoyed the company of other writers: thanks to Taylor and his circle, he met Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as the essayists William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey. He and John Keats passed each other like ships in the night, one of them arriving in Taylor's office just after the other had left. But he felt ill at ease in the city. Then again, when he returned home, now a local celebrity, he sensed the jealousy among the villagers: as Hazlitt once remarked, the trouble with rural life is that everybody knows everybody's business and petty meanness is readily compounded into something more damaging when a community is small, closed and unused to change. Once again, Clare saw himself becoming an outsider. He retreated to the woods and wandered the footpaths. He turned within himself. In the middle years of the 1820s he endured periods of severe depression.

His relationship with John Taylor was strained by arguments over editorial intervention, royalty payments and the delays surrounding his third book, The Shepherd's Calendar: with Village Stories and other Poems. To be fair to Taylor, it did not help that, following the death of Lord Byron in 1824 and the onset of a recession, the publishing industry had gone into decline, especially at the rarefied end of poetry as opposed to the popular market of cookbooks and uplifting religious works. The Shepherd's Calendar finally limped into print in 1827, but it fell on stony ground. Taste had changed and Clare had missed his moment.

In 1832, Clare's patrons and friends persuaded him to leave Helpston and move to a better-appointed cottage, with its own garden and orchard, in the village of Northborough, some three and half miles away. To us, the distance seems negligible, but for Clare — a poetic miniaturist, an inhabiter of locality — removal to Northborough meant exile from all that he knew and all in which he felt secure. He marked his departure with a great poem of homelessness called "The Flitting", in which he imagined even his favourite armchair feeling displaced in the new house.

The second cottage — which remains in private hands today, in contrast to the Helpston home which has been bought by the John Clare Trust as a place where schoolchildren can come to learn about nature and England's great nature poet — would never feel like a true home. Clare's insecurities mounted and his family found it increasingly hard to live with him. In 1837, he was admitted by authority of his wife Patty to a private lunatic asylum at High Beach in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London. While there, his physical health improved but he suffered increasingly from delusions. He imagined that he was Lord Byron, or a prizefighter called Jack Randall. He was allowed considerable liberty to walk in the forest — the asylum keeper, Matthew Allen, used relatively advanced methods of treatment, the nature cure among them.