The Life of Francis Thompson

POEMS of "Sight and Insight," the first section of the new book, were to have been called "Mystical Poems." But the word mystical was, in the event, abandoned. As Catholic and t...

THE friends he found for distraction in London were few, his acquaintances still fewer; thus his biographer, in falling back on such slight records as would go unnoticed in a li...

FRANCIS'S health often dismayed him, and his terrors both in regard to sicknesses and politics covered many pages of threatening letters. The mere streets became more and more a...

AN awed, awkward youth, Francis had yet, before the age of eighteen, experience enough to know how futile for him was the study of medicine. A career in medicine, a career in an...

A RALLY, probably the result of a gift from Manchester, came about in the latter half of February 1887. I quote his own words: "With a few shillings to give me breathing space,...

THE _Morning Post_ reviewer dwelt on his "incomprehensible sentiments and unknown words," and even his friends had before publication warned him that his meanings were lost in t...

TO him who had during that last week fathomed the abysses of Manchester, the "unfathomable abyss" of London was hardly more black. It might be supposed that the city of Manchest...

THE discovery that a man cannot, with any permanence, live by himself was made after his experience in London and at Storrington. He had returned to my father's neighbourhood re...

"Prose is clay; poetry the white, molten metal. It is plastic, not merely to gross touch, but to the lightest breath, a wish, a half-talent, an unconscious feather-passage of em...

IN 1870, after the summer vacation, Francis was sent to Ushaw College, four miles from Durham. By the kind fate that has kept many memories of him alive, his journey thither is...

IN 1892 F. T. had gone to Pantasaph. He was quartered, at first, in Bishop's House, at the monastery gates,[34] and the sandalled friars looked after all his wants--from boots t...

ON days when London is cracked and bleared with cold, and passengers on the black pavement are grey and purple and mean in their distress, whipped by the East Wind and chivied b...

IN 1893 Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane published _Poems_, a square book in brown boards with gold circles and a frontispiece by Laurence Housman. The poet viewed it with pl...

RENUNCIATION is the better part of possession: Francis states very clearly that compulsion must have no hand in it if it is to be profitable. He writes under the heading, "A dis...

"I WAS born in 1858 or 1859 (I never could remember and don't care which) at Preston in Lancashire. Residing there, my mother more than once pointed out to me, as we passed it,...

would have objected to have altered in permanent record. He accepted and justified my use of the phrase, in a poem drawing only an aspect of his character. But where it was conn...

THE poet is important, present, manifest to the poet. His poetry is an addition to his state, which yet is complete without it. The state of poetry, the state of the poet, has s...

IN July, 1896, the year of his death, Patmore made an offer of service memorable from a man, called arrogant and harsh, to a man who might well, in personal matters, have stirre...