Wn hodgson biography for kids videos

In the two decades following his death, William Noel Hodgson was one of the best known of the war poets. The first collected edition of his work published under his own name, in November , sold out in a few weeks; within months it was into its third edition. After the war his poems were anthologized, broadcast — especially on Armistice Day — and even set to music.

He used traditional verse forms with a fluency which lent itself well to musical settings, and the characteristic mix of resolve, resignation and sadness that resonates through his war poems was in tune with the popular mood. He was close to his father, who longed for him to enter the church; his own attitude to this seems to have been more ambivalent.

At twelve years old he won a scholarship to Durham School, going on from there in to Christ Church, Oxford as an Exhibitioner, to read Greats. He was passionate about the Classics, particularly Homer, and took his copies of the Iliad and Odyssey in the original Greek to France with him in Hodgson wrote poetry and stories from childhood.

William Noel Hodgson was the fourth

The earliest surviving manuscripts date back to , when he was sixteen. They cover a wide range of subjects and styles and show that even at that age he took writing seriously and read widely. By the time he was an undergraduate, he had started to submit work for publication. In he had poems accepted by The Spectator and The Nation.

By the spring of at the latest, he had made the most important literary contact of his life with Cecil Chesterton, G. Cecil owned and ran The New Witness , which featured work by some of the leading writers of the day. Other poems followed and as the war progressed, Chesterton was not only publishing almost all the work Hodgson sent him, he was actively encouraging him to write more, in prose as well as verse.

A keen climber, he craved the long perspectives of the mountain top and they informed his approach to life.