Their Lives and Works. BEING AN ACCOUNT OF ABOUT Four hundred verse writers OF DEVON AND CORNWALL, WITH POEMS AND EXTRACTS. ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS. BY W. H. KEARLEY WRIGHT, F.R. H.S., BOROUGH LIBRARIAN, PLYMOUTH. LONDON: ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 1896. INTRODUCTION. IT is a somewhat remarkable fact that the majority of English people are lacking in interest in the poetical writers of their country. A recent writer, commenting on the long delay in the appointment of a Poet Laureate to succeed the late Lord Tennyson, refers to us as a prosaic nation, and argues that although we produce as large an amount of the finest poetry as any other European people, we consume but little, the gap that separates our artists from the public being profound and incomprehensible. 'England,' he says, 'is divided in this matter into a handful who write verse, a scattered few who love it, and a vast inert mass who utterly ignore and could never understand it.'* It would be difficult to find two counties in England which have produced more poets of standing than Devon and Cornwall. The vigour of the people of this West Country and the beauty of the district may be held to account for this pre-eminence in poetic culture and expression; we can almost trace a flavour of the air and scenery of the country in many of the writings of its sons. For many years it has been my pleasant duty to collect the works of the authors of Devon and Cornwall, and I have thus been led to the discovery of many comparatively unknown versifiers, as well as to a better knowledge of the works of the more popular poets of this favoured corner of England. When I commenced compiling this volume I found myself confronted with a rather formidable undertaking; and during the progress of the necessary researches I have examined and passed under review the works of some six or seven hundred writers. My greatest difficulty has been in the abundance of material and in the work of judicious selection and condensation, it being practically impossible to include and to deal fairly with so large a number of writers in the comparatively restricted area of a single volume, even though that volume has grown to nearly twice the size originally contemplated. The work covers a period of nearly seven centuries, and includes many long-forgotten writers, as well as those who have made their names familiar to the English-speaking race the world over. From the days of Joseph Iscanus in the twelfth century down to the present time there have been a multitude of minor poets connected with the counties of Devon and Cornwall, many of whose names are quite unknown to the literary student of to-day. * Grant Allen in Westminster Gazette, August 29, 1894. |