The Pocket Guide to Poets Poetry by Andrew Taylor

Author:Andrew Taylor [Taylor, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Literary Criticism, Poetry
ISBN: 9781844687107
Google: cbbNDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2011-07-12T00:43:08+00:00

Francis Thompson (1859–1907)

Francis Thompson spent three years as a homeless opium addict in London, writing poetry which he submitted to a Roman Catholic magazine run by the husband of the poet Alice Meynell. Meynell and her husband encouraged him to continue writing, and arranged for the publication of his first book, Poems (1893), which was followed by two more books of intensely religious verse. His most famous poem was The Hound of Heaven (1890), which pictures God hunting down the human soul, but he also wrote the much gentler and nostalgic cricket poem, At Lord’s (1908). Thompson’s health was permanently damaged by his opium addiction, and he died of tuberculosis at the age of 48.

Sir Henry Newbolt (1862–1938)

Sir Henry Newbolt was a barrister and novelist who also became famous as the author of stirring patriotic ballads and poems such as Drake’s Drum and Vitaı¨ Lampada (The Torch of Life), both published in Admirals All and Other Verses (1897). Vitaı¨ Lampada in particular, with its rousing injunction to ‘Play up, play up, and play the game’ enjoyed huge popularity, although Newbolt later said that continued requests to recite it sometimes made him feel that he had created a Frankenstein’s monster. More of Newbolt’s poetry, much of it nautical and inspirational, was published in Poems Old and New (1912), catching the mood of eager patriotism at the start of the First World War. Newbolt was knighted in 1915, after being recruited to help maintain public morale during the war, and later served as comptroller of wireless and cables. He also wrote the official naval history of the war, and was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1922.

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

Rudyard Kipling was born in British-ruled India, and returned there as a young man after an unhappy childhood in England to work as a journalist. Memories of India inform many of the short stories he started to write – he brought out six volumes between 1887 and 1889 – and also the novel Kim (1901). Kipling also published Barrack Room Ballads (1892) a collection which sought to depict the lives and feelings of ordinary British soldiers through poems such as Danny Deever, Gunga Din, and Mandalay. Other collections of poetry and short stories followed, among them the two Jungle Books (1894–1895), The Seven Seas (1896) and Rewards and Fairies (1909), which included his famous poem If, which he later complained had been ‘anthologised to weariness’. Recessional, Kipling’s sombre forecast of the eventual decline of the British Empire he loved, was written to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Today, poems such as Recessional or The White Man’s Burden (1899) seem to demonstrate a short-sighted imperialism, but the death in the First World War of Kipling’s son Jack revealed a more sensitive, vulnerable character. His elegy, My Boy Jack was published in 1915, and in his collection The Years Between (1919), he wrote an epitaph for the fallen soldiers of the War:

‘If any question why we died, Tell them, Because our fathers lied.’

Kipling was

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