Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
W. H. Davies: Essays on the Super-Tramp Poet

W. H. Davies: Essays on the Super-Tramp Poet

Waterman, Rory

Hardcover

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 1785274562
ISBN13: 9781785274565
Publisher: Anthem Pr
Published: Jan 15 2021
Pages: 194
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

This book brings together, for the first time, a collection of articles from leading scholars on the writing, and literary and social contexts, of the 'tramp-poet' and memoirist W. H. Davies (1871-1940). Though Davies is a well-known and unique literary figure of the early twentieth century, most famous now for The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp and poems such as 'Leisure', which came 14th in the BBC's search to find 'The Nation's Favourite Poems', no other volume of essays, or other critical monograph, concentrates on his work. This book not only provides a reassessment of Davies, putting him in his literary and cultural context (as a Welsh writer, the 'tramp-poet', a prominent Georgian poet, and a disabled writer), but also sheds light on the many more central literary figures he encountered and befriended, among them Edward Thomas, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Sitwell, Alice Meynell, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad. The aim of the book is to reconsider the major works of the 'tramp-poet' and memoirist W.H. Davies, and his place in the literary and cultural milieu of his period. Davies spent several years in North America as a young man, traversing the continent and living mainly as a tramp, and losing a leg in the process, as he attempted to jump aboard a freight train in Ontario. These experiences are at the heart of his famous memoir, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), which was edited by Edward Thomas and introduced by George Bernard Shaw. Davies also established a reputation as a poet and was included in all five of the immensely popular Georgian Poetry anthologies between 1912 and 1922. He continued to write, in particular about his life, and later books include many volumes of poetry and memoirs such as: A Poet's Pilgrimage (1918), which details a walking tour across southern Britain and the people he encountered; Later Days (1924), about the literary and artistic communities he had recently belonged to; and Young Emma (written in the late 1920s but not published until 1980), a thinly anonymised memoir about how he met his wife, almost thirty years his junior. They are unique products of a unique life.

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