Alfred Noyes Letter, September 17, 1923

Containers:

Box 3, Folder 10

Scope and content:

In this letter, dated September 17, 1923, Alfred Noyes agrees to read Owlett's manuscript. Kyle has asked for details of an incident about the editor of The Spectator, St. Loe Strachey. In an article on English blank verse Strachey quoted "Woah Hill," a long poem by William Barnes, the Dorset poet, stating that it did not contain a single rhyme. "It happens to be one of the most subtly and carefully rhymed poems in English ... and he'd missed the rhymes because they were carried on from stanza to stanza." He states that The Spectator "patronizes the worst of the Bolsheviks in poetry," but that "The Poetry Review is doing good work." It is accompanied by an envelope addressed: F. C. Owlett Esq. / 82 West Hill / Sydenham / London S.E.26. A three halfpence postage stamp is cancelled, Rottingdean, 7 PM, 17 SP 23. Alfred Noyes (1880-1958), a poet, was born in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, England. His first book of poetry was completed while studying at Oxford, which he left without taking a degree. His most successful work deals with the sea and the Elizabethan tradition, the epic Drake, 1908. Having married an American, he travelled in the United States, and became visiting professor of poetry at Princeton from 1914 to 1923. In 1922 appeared The Torchbearers, a panegyric in blank verse on the hitherto comparatively unsung men of science. He published literary essays in Some Aspects of Modern Poetry, 1924, a defense of traditionalism, and he also wrote plays, and studies of William Morris and Voltaire. Noyes died on June 28, 1958. Frederick Charles Owlett, sometimes called F.C. Owlett, was an author who wrote Kultur and Anarchy (1917), Chatterton's Apology (1930), Francis Thompson (1936), The Spacious Days and Other Essays (1937), and Shakespeare and Charles Lamb (1938) among others. Former accession number MSS 78-13. Letter purchased from C.A. Kyrle Fletcher.

Access and use