Henry Newbolt

Sir Henry John Newbolt (born June 6, 1862 in Bilston , then in Staffordshire , † April 19, 1938 in Kensington (London) ) was a British poet, writer and historian. He has also been an advisor to the UK Government on education and Irish issues. He became known through some patriotic poems in England.

Newbolt 1898, by William Strang

Life

Newbolt attended Clifton College in Bristol and studied at Oxford University (Corpus Christi College). He practiced as a lawyer from 1887 to 1899. In 1892 he published his novel Taken from the Enemy and in 1895 a drama Mordred . But he became known for ballads, first Admirals All in 1897, with his most famous poem in England Vitai Lampada from 1892. The title is a quote from Lucretius (De rerum natura II) and means torch of life and the tenor of the ballad is learning to be soldier Virtues at English colleges (modeled after Newbolt's Clifton College). The soldier is cheered on by his superior in the turmoil of a battle (allusion to the battle of Abu Klea in 1885 in Sudan) with the same words (play up, play up and play the game) as in college cricket . The poem was very popular in England at the time and was still very popular at the beginning of the First World War. It was still popular in Canada in the 1920s, while Newbolt distanced himself from it. When, on a lecture tour there in 1923, he was constantly asked to recite it, he spoke of it as a Frankenstein monster that he had created.

He also made an impression on his English contemporaries with another poem, Drake's Drum (1897, also in Admirals All ), in which he spun out the legend that an old drum by Francis Drake (in the family home in Buckland Abbey) would be struck if England how distressed at the time when threatened by the Spanish Armada. The Fighting Temeraire (to the painting by JMW Turner ), a poem about Peter Parker , captain of the Menelaus (St. Stefano), and about the destruction of Carthage (Vae Victis), the title poem about English admirals and sea heroes, were in the same volume of poems the death of George W. Hayward (He fell among thieves), the Gordon Highlanders , Admiral Hawke , John Nicholson , the Dictionary of National Biography, and the siege of the British legation in the Second Anglo-Afghan War (The Guides of Cabul 1879).

His Songs of the Sea (1904) and Songs of the Fleet (1910), which were set to music as song cycles by Charles Villiers Stanford , also became famous.

In 1914 he published the fantasy novel Aladore .

Clifton College

During the First World War , like other British writers, he served in the propaganda department ( War Propaganda Bureau under Charles Masterman ) and was then responsible for film ( Controller of Telecommunications at the British Foreign Office). On October 14, 1916, his poem The War Films was published on the cover of the Times, in response to the film The Battle of the Somme , which shocked English audiences and shown authentic footage of the great British losses on the Somme . He was friends with Douglas Haig .

He was married to the publisher's daughter Margaret Edina Duckworth and had a son and a daughter. The couple had a "marriage for three" with the childhood friend of his wife Ella Coltman, to whom Newbolt also dedicated a poem.

His 1921 government report on the reform of English teaching was influential. He also advised Herbert Asquith's cabinet on Ireland issues. As a historian, he completed the official history of the Royal Navy in the First World War by Julian Corbett, which was unfinished upon his death .

In 1915 he was ennobled as a Knight Bachelor and in 1922 as Companion of Honor (CH).

Fonts

Books of poetry:

• Admirals All, London: E. Mathews 1897, New York, John Lane 1898
• The Island Race, London: E. Mathews 1898, New York: John Lane 1899
• The Sailing of the Long-ships, New York: Appleton 1902, Archive
• Songs of the Sea 1904
• Clifton Chapel and other poems, J. Murray 1908
• Songs of Memory and Hope, London, J. Murray 1909
• Songs of the Fleet 1910
• Collected Poems 1897-1910, London, New York, T. Nelson and Sons 1910, Project Gutenberg
• Poems New and Old, London, J. Murray 1912, Project Gutenberg
• St. George's day, and other poems, London, J. Murray 1918
• Drake's drum, and other songs of the sea,
• with Walter de la Mare , Ralph Furse: A perpetual memory, and other poems, London, J. Murray 1939

Otherwise:

• A fair death, London 1888
• The book of the thin red line, London: Longmans, Green 1915 (book for young people)
• The book of the happy warrior, London, Longmans Green 1917 (book for young people)
• Mordred, a tragedy, London: TF Unwin 1895
• Tales of the Great War, Longmans, Green 1916 (children's book)
• The war and the nations, London: Richard Clay and Sons 1915
• The Linnet's nest, London: Faber and Gwyer 1927
• The Book of the Long Trail, Longmans, Green 1919
• The book of good hunting, Longmans, Green 1920
• A child is born, Faber and Faber 1931
• The New June, London: Blackwood, New York: EP Dutton 1909
• The book of the blue sea, London: Longmans Green 125
• The Twymans: a tale of youth, Blackwood 1911
• The book of the Grenvilles, Longmans, Green 1921

Novels:

• Taken from the enemy, London: Chatto and Windus 1892
• Aladore, Edinburgh, London, Blackwood and Sons 1914
• The Old Country. A Romance, London, Smith, Elder and Company 1906, New York, Dutton 1907

Non-fiction books:

• A new study of English poetry, London: Constable 1917
• Poetry and Time, Oxford UP 1919
• The teaching of English in England, being the Report of the Departmental committee appointed by the president of the Board of education to inquire into the position of English in the educational system of England, London, HMSO 1921
• The year of Trafalgar being an account of the battle and of the events which led up to it, with a collection of the poems and ballads written thereupon between 1805 and 1905, London, J. Murray 1905
• Sea-life in English literature from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, T. Nelson and Sons 1925
• The idea of ​​an English Association, Oxford UP 1928
• Peacock, Scott and Robin Hood, London 1924
• The tide of time in english poetry, London, T. Nelson and Sons 1925
• Essays and Essayists, London, Edinburgh, T. Nelson and Sons 1925
• Submarine and anti-Submarine, London: Longmans, Green 1918
• A note on the history of submarine war, New York: George H. Doran 1917
• with Julian Corbett: Naval Operations. The Naval History of the Great War: Based on Official Documents, Vol. 4,5, 1923
• The Story of the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (The Old 43rd & 52nd Regiments), New York, Scribners 1915
• My world as in my time: memoirs of Sir Henry Newbolt, 1862-1932, London: Faber and Faber, 1932 (autobiography)

He has also published anthologies of poetry and prose, for example New paths on Helicon (London, New York, T. Nelson and sons 1927).

literature

• Susan Chitty Playing the Game. Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt , Quartet Books 1997
• Margaret Newbolt The later life and letters of Sir Henry Newbolt , London, Faber and Faber 1942
• Selected Poems of Henry Newbolt, edited by Patric Dickinson, London Hodder and Stoughton 1981

Web links

• Biography at firstworldwar with his poem Vitai Lampada
• Admiral's All Poems in Poets Corner