Alfred Noyes
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Alfred Noyes (September 16, 1880 – June 28, 1958)[1] was an English poet, best known for his ballads The Highwayman (1906) and The Barrel Organ.
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[edit] Life
Born in Wolverhampton, England, he was the son of Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes. Noyes attended Exeter College, Oxford, leaving before he had earned a degree.
In 1907, he married Garnett Daniels. He was given the opportunity to teach English literature at Princeton University, where he taught from 1914 until 1923. Noyes' wife died in 1926, resulting in his conversion to Roman Catholicism. He wrote about his conversion in The Unknown God, published in 1934.
Noyes later married Mary Angela Mayne Weld-Blundell, who had first married into the old recusant Catholic Weld-Blundell family.[2] They settled at Lisle Combe, near Ventnor on the Isle of Wight and had three children: Hugh, Veronica, and Margaret. His younger daughter married Michael Nolan (later Lord Nolan) in 1953.
Noyes died at the age of 77 and was buried on the Isle of Wight.
[edit] Works
At 21 years of age, he published his first collection of poems, The Loom Years. From 1903 to 1908, Noyes published five volumes of poetry books, including The Forest of Wild Thyme and The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems.In 1918,he followed with a short story colection entiteled "Walking Shadows, Sea Tales and Others" (Cassell) ,which included the tale "The Lusitania Waits" (a ghost revenge tale based on the sinking of the Lusitania by a german submarine in 1915,though the tale actualy is based on the false claims that the "Goetz" medal was awarded to the submarine crew for sinking the Lusitania) and in 1924 with another colection entitled "The Hidden Player" (Hodder and Stoughton) . [2]
For the Pageant of Empire at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition he wrote a series of poems which were set to music by Sir Edward Elgar and also known as Pageant of Empire: amongst these was Shakespeare's Kingdom.
He later started dictating his work as a result of increasing blindness. In 1953, his autobiography, Two Worlds for Memory, was published. He authored around sixty books, including poetry volumes, novels, and short stories.
[edit] Notes
- ^ [1] According to some sources, he died on June 25, but others, including Encyclopædia Britannica give the date as June 28
- ^ http://www.thepeerage.com/p4558.htm#i45579
[edit] External links
- Works by or about Alfred Noyes at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
- Works by Alfred Noyes at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
- Escape's radio adaptation of Noye's "Log of the Evening Star"
