John Clare’s fidelity to what he calls the “Language of Nature” and his resistance to substantive editorial alterations frequently recur throughout his editorial correspondence, indicating his enduring allegiance to a defiantly “vulgar” conception of language. Clare denounces the hypocrisy of those squeamish “bluestockings” who attempt to bowdlerize his poems while secretly relishing their salacious language. His most outspoken resistance to grammatical correction occurs in a letter of February 1822, resisting some editorial changes by John Taylor: “I may alter but I cannot mend. Grammar in learning is like Tyranny in government—confound the bitch I’ll never be her slave & have a vast good mind not to alter the verse in question.” This stubborn attitude became quite emphatic during the composition of The Shepherd’s Calendar, when Clare took up a directly adversarial stance toward Taylor. It continued even after Clare's confinement in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (in 1841); his keeper, W. F. Knight, testified that Clare “in no instance has ever rewritten a single line—whenever I have wished him to correct a single line he has ever shown the greatest disinclination to take in hand what to him seems a great task.” Clare’s linguistic and prosodic experiments during his asylum period represent the final stage of his quest for a mode of poetic discourse free from the tyranny of grammar and adequate to the expression of his tragic struggle for personal and regional identity.