William Watson (poet)

Sir William Watson
Photo by Elliott & Fry, Ltd.
Born	2 August 1858(1858-08-02) Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire
Died	13 August 1935(1935-08-13) (aged 77) Rottingdean, Sussex

Sir William Watson (2 August 1858 – 13 August 1935), was an English poet, popular in his time for the political content of his verse. He was born in Burley, in West Yorkshire.

He was a prolific poet of the 1890s, and a contributor to The Yellow Book, though without 'decadent' associations. Indeed he was very much on the traditionalist wing of English poetry. He had a gift for resonant phrasing and reiterative rhythms which he mistook (and for 20 years many critics mistook) as a gift for poetry. He was, however, well equipped to write suitable effusions on public occasions, indeed better equipped than any of his contemporaries. This made him, on Tennyson's death (1892), a strong candidate for Poet Laureate, but his often extreme views on foreign policy (he was passionately anti-Ottoman) and a breakdown in 1894 led to him being passed over by the then Prime Minister Lord Salisbury in favour of Alfred Austin, who was a poor poet but a loyal conservative. Again after Austin's death in 1913, Asquith seriously considered him for the post, despite the fact that he had written a cruel pasquil against Margot Asquith ('She is not old, she is not young/ The woman with the serpent's tongue'). In exchange for writing a panegyric of Lloyd George (1917) he was awarded a knighthood. After the Great War he was largely forgotten, until a number of literary men in 1935 issued a public appeal for a fund to support him in his old age; but when he died the following year, his widow Lady Watson was obliged to seek employment in domestic service. In all he was a sad example of a writer who was at first overrated and then neglected because of changing tastes, a misfortune all too common in the twentieth century. He deserves, however, to be remembered for a few poems (such as 'Wordsworth's Grave') that say conventional things gracefully and rightly.

Works

• The Prince's Quest and Other Poems (1880)
• Epigrams of Art, Life and Nature (1884)
• Wordsworth’s Grave and Other Poems (1890)
• Poems (1892)
• Lachrymae Musarum (1892)
• Lyric Love: An Anthology (1892)
• Eloping Angels : A Caprice (1893)
• The Poems of William Watson (1893)
• Excursions in Criticism: Being Some Prose Recreations Of A Rhymer (1893)
• Odes and Other Poems (1894)
• The Father of the Forest & Other Poems (1895)
• The Purple East: A Series Of Sonnets On England's Desertion of Armenia (1896)
• The Year of Shame (1897)
• The Hope of the World and Other Poems (1898)
• The Collected Poems of William Watson (1899)
• Ode on the Coronation of King Edward VII (1902)
• Selected Poems (1903)
• For England. Poems Written During Estrangement (1904)
• New Poems (1909)
• Sable and Purple (1910)
• The Heralds of the Dawn: A Play in Eight Scenes (1912)
• The Muse in Exile (1913)
• Pencraft. A Plea For The Older Ways (1916)
• The Man Who Saw: and Other Poems Arising out of the War (1917)
• Retrogression and Other Poems (1917)
• The Superhuman Antagonists and Other Poems (1919)

References

• Jean Moorcroft Wilson (1981) I Was an English Poet: a Critical Biography of Sir William Watson 1858-1936
• Kunitz, Stanley J and Howard Haycraft, Twentieth Century Authors. H.W.Wilson, 1942.

External links

• Works by William Watson at Project Gutenberg
  • The Poems of William Watson from Project Gutenberg