Alfred Noyes

Alfred Noyes CBE (16 September 1880 – 25 June 1958) was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright.

Noyes was born in Wolverhampton, England the son of Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes.

When he was four, the family moved to Aberystwyth, Wales, where his father taught Latin and Greek.

The Welsh coast and mountains were an inspiration to Noyes.

In 1898, he left Aberystwyth for Exeter College, Oxford, where he distinguished himself at rowing, but failed to get his degree because he was meeting his publisher to arrange publication of his first volume of poems, The Loom of Years (1902) on a crucial day of his finals in 1903.

Noyes published five more volumes of poetry from 1903 to 1913, among them The Flower of Old Japan (1903) and Poems (1904).

Poems included "The Barrel-Organ".

"The Highwayman" was first published in the August 1906 issue of Blackwood's Magazine, and included the following year in Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems.

Another major work in this phase of his career was Drake, a 200-page epic in blank verse about the Elizabethan naval commander Sir Francis Drake, which was published in two volumes (1906 and 1908).

The poem shows the clear influence of Romantic poets such as Tennyson and Wordsworth, both in style and subject.

In 1907, Noyes married Garnett Daniels, youngest daughter of US Army Colonel Byron G. Daniels, a Civil War veteran who was for some years U.S. Consul at Hull.

Noyes' only full-length play, Sherwood, was published in 1911; it was reissued in 1926, with alterations, as Robin Hood.

One of his most popular poems, "A Song of Sherwood", also dates from 1911.

Noyes first visited America in February 1913, partly to lecture on world peace and disarmament and partly to satisfy his wife's desire that he should gather fresh experiences in her homeland.

His first lecture tour lasted six weeks, extending as far west as Chicago.

It proved so successful that he decided to make a second trip to the US in October and to stay six months.

In 1913, when it seemed that war might yet be avoided, he published a long anti-war poem called The Wine Press.

One American reviewer wrote that Noyes was "inspired by a fervent hatred of war and all that war means", and had used "all the resources of his varied art" to depict its "ultimate horror".

The poet and critic Helen Bullis found Noyes' "anti-militarist" poem "remarkable", "passionate and inspiring", but, in its "unsparing realism", lacking in "the large vision, which sees the ultimate truth rather than the immediate details".

In her view, Noyes failed to address the "vital questions" raised, for example, by William James' observation that for modern man, "War is the strong life; it is life in extremis", or by Shakespeare's invocation in The Two Noble Kinsmen of war as the "great corrector" that heals and cures "sick" times.

Bullis, a Freudian (unlike Noyes, for whom psychoanalysis was a pseudo-science), thought war had deeper roots than Noyes acknowledged.

She saw looming "the great figures of the Fates back of the conflict, while Mr Noyes sees only the 'five men in black tail-coats' whose cold statecraft is responsible for it".

In this trip, he visited the principal American universities, including Princeton, where the impression he made on the faculty and undergraduates was so favourable that in February 1914 he was asked to join the staff as a visiting professor, lecturing on modern English literature from February to June.

He accepted, and for the next nine years he and his wife divided their year between England and the US.

At Princeton, Noyes' students included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop.

In 1915, Upton Sinclair included some striking passages from The Wine Press in his anthology of the literature of social protest, The Cry for Justice.

During World War I, Noyes was debarred by defective eyesight from serving at the front.

"The Lusitania Waits" is a ghost revenge story based on the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915 – although the tale hinges on an erroneous claim that the submarine crew had been awarded the Goetz medal for sinking the ship.

During World War II, Noyes wrote the same kind of patriotic poems, but he also wrote a much longer and more considered work, If Judgement Comes, in which Hitler stands accused before the tribunal of history.

Instead, from 1916, he did his military service on attachment to the Foreign Office, where he worked with John Buchan on propaganda.

He also did his patriotic chore as a literary figure, writing morale-boosting short stories and exhortatory odes and lyrics recalling England's military past and asserting the morality of her cause.

These works are now forgotten, apart from two ghost stories, "The Lusitania Waits" and "The Log of the Evening Star", which are still occasionally reprinted in collections of tales of the uncanny.

He resigned his professorship in 1923, but continued to travel and lecture throughout the United States for the rest of his life.

His wife died in 1926 at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, where she and Noyes were staying with friends.

Noyes is often portrayed by hostile critics as a militarist and jingoist.

Actually, he was a pacifist who hated war and lectured against it, but felt that, when threatened by an aggressive and unreasoning enemy, a nation could not but fight.

On this principle, he opposed the Boer War, but supported the Allies in both the World Wars.

It was first published separately (1941) and then in the collection, Shadows on the Down and Other Poems (1945).

In a nationwide poll conducted by the BBC in 1995 to find Britain's favourite poem, "The Highwayman" was voted the nation's 15th favourite poem.

Eventually, one of the more popular ballads dating from this period, "Bacchus and the Pirates", was set to music for two voices and piano by Michael Brough, and first performed at the Swaledale Festival in 2012.