In two recent essays, have argued that John Clare's poetry presents a poetics of displacement. (1) Tropes of dislocation and vagrancy permeate his work from earliest poems, such as and The Wish, to asylum poems, such as Invite to Eternity and I Am. My aim in these earlier essays was to demonstrate that Clare who is usually thought of as poet of place, might more precisely be called poet of between places. Like traveler who makes no plans and carries no maps, Clare's poetic personae comprise a subject in process, ever shifting and adapting as it meets and is interpolated by contingencies of its journey, new cognitive and physical terrain it encounters. As such, Clare's position corresponds strikingly to dynamic, fluid, and hybridized identities of colonized subjects theorized in works of Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and other postcolonial theorists. Originating from a peasant-poet who was a survivor of internal colonialism, (2) Clare's poetics of derives from a historical position similar to, but not identical with, disarticulated subaltern in colonial condition. In this essay will explore some of those connections, focusing particularly upon hybridized signature of peasant-poet and multi-voiced mimicry in Clare's Child Harold. Despite a brief period in his early poetic career when he became, in Tim Chilcott's words, the darling of London literary scene (92), Clare was located physically, socially, psychologically, and to some degree even linguistically, at periphery of cultural, political and economic power. Largely self-taught and poor, walking line between hard labor in fields and specter of poor relief, Clare was subject to transformation of agricultural and literary relations of production as well as to their regimes of representation. Thus, Clare is reminiscent of those marginals who, in Bhabha's terms, have suffered sentence of history--subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement (172). Unlike strategically deployed figures of marginality and exile in poetry of Byron and Wordsworth, Clare's figures stem from his direct experience of disorientation from enclosure of Helpston after 1809; from demise of rural folkways that he repeatedly laments in his poetry; from his resistance to censorship from his patrons; from his anxiety about and disappointment over never being fully accepted as an equal within literary marketplace; and from trials of illness and poverty that troubled him through his life. Clare was never confident that he had fully attained status of author that he had learned and been encouraged to value, in part because he could never fully shake off status of peasant or rustic that had been thrust upon him as an authenticating signature, and in part because he suspected that his first success may have been founded upon fleeting judgment of fashion rather than solid principles of taste. Throughout his letters, Clare worries that his reputation as an author may rest upon false premises. As early as February 24, 1821, Clare worried Taylor idea that his patrons, Lord Radstock and Mrs. Emmerson, may have dropped him for a fresher child of nature: so god send they may find out a new 'child of nature' to foster & flatter whose name is rather fresher then mine ... (Letters 160). Summing up his career as a poet to Henry, Francis Cary sometime after October 20,1832, Clare writes: I felt some vanity that had a claim to title of a poet & it was praise & commendation of men of genius that fostered that ambition (Letters 594); anticipating response to a new collection of poems, Clare goes on to say, I wished to be judged of by book itself without any appeals to want of education lowness of origin or any other foil that officousness [sic] chuses to encumber my path with (Letters 594). Thus, though there were moments when Clare asserted his poetic powers as strongly as any poet, his letters betray a long-standing ambivalence about measure of his success. …