An unusual man in my mind when I asked this question is Taneda Santoka, a Japanese poet. He was from a wealthy background but couldn’t settle in employment or as a married man and tried to commit suicide by standing in front of a train at the age of 42 in 1924.
The driver saw him in time and he survived. He went to a nearby temple where he studied Zen Buddhism for a year and after this he began wandering round Japan begging for food and for shelter and writing brief haiku style poems. He is estimated to have covered 28,000 miles in this way. He was little known at the time of his death in 1940 but by the 1970’s his poetry was famous, at least in Japan.