John Clare was fascinated by both literary success and by individual authors, notably John and Robert Bloomfield, whom he considered unjustly neglected. He values Keats's poems for their abstract beauties, cherishes their choice phrases and linguistic turns; but, in letters to their mutual publisher, John Taylor, he describes in obscure phrases which, in his autobiography and correspondence of 1821, he reapplies to his own life. My account of the mediated, self-reflexive and misrepresented relationship between the poets, and the importance of in Clare's developing sense of his own cultural position, centres on two composite texts: To the of John Keats and Fate of Genius. Early in 1821, Clare exchanged regular letters with Taylor while writing his life story for the preface to the second collection. Whatever the subject--Clare's drunkenness and mental wanderings, his frustrating writer's block or, frequently, the detail of proofs and revisions for his forthcoming second volume--the letters convey a constant, unstated anxiety. They are constructed over the ghostly frame of speculation about in the uncertain weeks before March 18, when Taylor received confirmation of Keats's death in Rome on February 23. He told Clare eight days later. Coincidentally, John Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, was killed on February 16, in a duel with John Christie, acting for John Lockhart, the editor of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. The loss was both personal and commercial, the culmination of Scott's indignation against Blackwood's, a coincidence that contributed to the myth of Keats's having been killed by reviews in the Scottish press. A third violent occurrence underscored the relevance of contemporary literary animosity to Clare's own writing career. On February 24, he wrote to Taylor, Is poor Scott gone--Drakard the Editor of the 'Stamford News' has been severly beaten this week in a rather cowardly way by a person coming in with the excuse of buying a book who while D. turnd to look [for] it cudgeld him with a stick & rid off the stranger had a footman with him & is some one no doubt that the Paper has provokingly abused but who it is or for what cause he has beaten him I know (Letters, 159-60). John Drakard, who supplied Clare with paper and books, had run a circulating library in Stamford (the market town five miles from Clare's home) and in 1830 engaged Clare as a regular contributor to his second newspaper, the Stamford Champion, having employed John Scott as editor of his first, the Stamford News (By Himself, 57; Natural History, 190, 230; Letters, 490; Newton and Smith, 292). Clare's letter to Taylor, on or around March 8, demonstrates both the force of the connection and intensity of his response: G[ilchrist] tells me of Scott's death but I know all about it & about it & am as sorry for it as he can be tho I knew nothing more of the man then by his actions which tells me he had more honesty and honour then his enemey Lockhardt is a d--d knave & a coward & my insignificant self woud tell him so to his teeth--but Mr G tells me to stick to a Cudgel when I quarrel (Letters, 163-64). Octavius Gilchrist--co-founder with Drakard of the Stamford News was involved in his own controversy with the Revd William Bowles, a dispute over Pope that drew in Byron, and Clare (Barton). Taylor's report of March 9 presumably crossed in the post: O. Gilchrist came up to attend poor Scott's Funeral which took place this Day. We heard yesterday of Keats; he was still alive, though very weak--but calmer than he had been. It was not considered that he would last many Days longer. Probably at the Time Scott he also died (Blunden, 88). Taylor's final announcement of Keats's death in a letter to Clare on March 26, is appended with an invitation to produce some Lines to his Memory and a warning that the pressures of the literary marketplace are ubiquitous: One of the very few Poets of the Day is gone--let another beware of Stamford. …