Alfred Noyes
Alfred Noyes CBE was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright.
Early years
Noyes was born in Wolverhampton, England the son of Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes. When he was four, the family moved to Aberystwyth, Wales, where his father taught Latin and Greek. The Welsh coast and mountains were an inspiration to Noyes.Early career
In 1898, he left Aberystwyth for Exeter College, Oxford, where he distinguished himself at rowing, but failed to get his degree because he was meeting his publisher to arrange publication of his first volume of poems, The Loom of Years, on a crucial day of his finals in 1903. On publication, The Loom of Years was lauded by W. B. Yeats and George Meredith. Noyes' poetry also proved popular with the book-buying public, and for the first two decades of his career his books sold well.''The Barrel-Organ'' and ''The Highwayman''
Noyes published five more volumes of poetry from 1903 to 1913, among them The Flower of Old Japan and Poems. Poems included "The Barrel-Organ". "The Highwayman" was first published in the August 1906 issue of Blackwood's Magazine, and included the following year in Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems. In a nationwide poll conducted by the BBC in 1995 to find Britain's favourite poem, "The Highwayman" was voted the nation's 15th favourite poem. This poem was also the inspiration for name of the American folk music revival group, The Highwaymen.''Drake''
Another major work in this phase of his career was Drake, a 200-page epic in blank verse about the Elizabethan naval commander Sir Francis Drake, which was published in two volumes. The poem shows the clear influence of Romantic poets such as Tennyson and Wordsworth, both in style and subject. Both volumes of Drake were the subjects of articles in The Times Literary Supplement.''Sherwood''
Noyes' only full-length play, Sherwood, was published in 1911; it was reissued in 1926, with alterations, as Robin Hood. One of his most popular poems, "A Song of Sherwood", also dates from 1911. Eventually, one of the more popular ballads dating from this period, "Bacchus and the Pirates", was set to music for two voices and piano by Michael Brough, and first performed at the Swaledale Festival in 2012.Views on literature
Noyes stated that Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Samuel Johnson and Alfred, Lord Tennyson were the greatest writers in the English language. Noyes modelled his poetry after Tennyson's, and published a critical study of Tennyson in 1932. Noyes also admired the work of William Morris; his study of that writer was published in 1908. It was praised by Andrew Lang and later by C. S. Lewis.By contrast, Noyes disliked most works of literary modernism. Noyes disdained the poetry of T. S. Eliot, regarding it as abstruse and pretentious. Noyes expressed contempt for Arnold Bennett, H. L. Mencken and Marcel Proust in his book The Edge of the Abyss, describing their works as salacious, irreligious and harmful to society as a whole. Noyes also had a special hatred for the work of James Joyce, calling it "filth". Noyes decried Joyce's Ulysses, claiming that the novel was obscure and gratuitously vulgar. In a 1922 article for the Sunday Chronicle, Noyes called Ulysses "Literary Bolshevism" and "the foulest book that has ever found its way into print." When Lord Birkenhead died in 1930, Noyes, in collaboration with Lord Darling, obtained the withdrawal of a copy of Ulysses from the auction sale of Birkenhead's effects.
First marriage and America
In 1907, Noyes married Garnett Daniels, youngest daughter of US Army Colonel Byron G. Daniels, a Civil War veteran who was for some years U.S. Consul at Hull. Noyes first visited America in February 1913, partly to lecture on world peace and disarmament and partly to satisfy his wife's desire that he should gather fresh experiences in her homeland. His first lecture tour lasted six weeks, extending as far west as Chicago. It proved so successful that he decided to make a second trip to the US in October and to stay six months. In this trip, he visited the principal American universities, including Princeton, where the impression he made on the faculty and undergraduates was so favourable that in February 1914 he was asked to join the staff as a visiting professor, lecturing on modern English literature from February to June. He accepted, and for the next nine years he and his wife divided their year between England and the US. At Princeton, Noyes' students included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. He resigned his professorship in 1923, but continued to travel and lecture throughout the United States for the rest of his life. Noyes' work proved to be popular in the United States. His writings were praised by the American reviewers Thomas Bailey Aldrich and William Lyon Phelps, and his poems were reprinted in numerous US newspapers and magazines. His wife died in 1926 at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, where she and Noyes were staying with friends.War
Noyes is often portrayed by hostile critics as a militarist and jingoist. Actually, he was a pacifist who hated war and lectured against it, but felt that, when threatened by an aggressive and unreasoning enemy, a nation could not but fight. On this principle, he opposed the Boer War, but supported the Allies in both the World Wars. In 1913, when it seemed that war might yet be avoided, he published a long anti-war poem called The Wine Press. One American reviewer wrote that Noyes was "inspired by a fervent hatred of war and all that war means", and had used "all the resources of his varied art" to depict its "ultimate horror". The poet and critic Helen Bullis found Noyes' "anti-militarist" poem "remarkable", "passionate and inspiring", but, in its "unsparing realism", lacking in "the large vision, which sees the ultimate truth rather than the immediate details". In her view, Noyes failed to address the "vital questions" raised, for example, by William James' observation that for modern man, "War is the strong life; it is life in extremis", or by Shakespeare's invocation in The Two Noble Kinsmen of war as the "great corrector" that heals and cures "sick" times. Bullis, a Freudian, thought war had deeper roots than Noyes acknowledged. She saw looming "the great figures of the Fates back of the conflict, while Mr Noyes sees only the 'five men in black tail-coats' whose cold statecraft is responsible for it". In 1915, Upton Sinclair included some striking passages from The Wine Press in his anthology of the literature of social protest, The Cry for Justice.During World War I, Noyes was debarred by defective eyesight from serving at the front. Instead, from 1916, he did his military service on attachment to the Foreign Office, where he worked with John Buchan on propaganda. He also did his patriotic chore as a literary figure, writing morale-boosting short stories and exhortatory odes and lyrics recalling England's military past and asserting the morality of her cause. These works are now forgotten, apart from two ghost stories, "The Lusitania Waits" and "The Log of the Evening Star", which are still occasionally reprinted in collections of tales of the uncanny. "The Lusitania Waits" is a ghost revenge story based on the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915 – although the tale hinges on an erroneous claim that the submarine crew had been awarded the Goetz medal for sinking the ship.
He aided pacifist causes financially, by contributing the whimsical poem A Spell for a Fairy to Princess Mary's Gift Book. The illustrations for this, by C.H.Shepperson, formed the templates for the Cottingley Fairies, controversially accepted, for instance by Arthur Conan Doyle as genuine evidence for psychic phenomena.
During World War II, Noyes wrote the same kind of patriotic poems, but he also wrote a much longer and more considered work, If Judgement Comes, in which Hitler stands accused before the tribunal of history. It was first published separately and then in the collection, Shadows on the Down and Other Poems. The only fiction Noyes published in World War II was The Last Man, a science fiction novel whose message could hardly be more anti-war. In the first chapter, a global conflict wipes out almost the entire human race.
Noyes' best-known anti-war poem, "The Victory Ball", was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1920. He wrote it after attending a ball held in London soon after the Armistice, where he found himself wondering what the ghosts of the soldiers who had died in the war would say if they could observe the thoughtless frivolity of the dancers. The message of the poem lies in the line, "Under the dancing feet are the graves." A brief passage about a girl "fresh from school" who "begs for a dose of the best cocaine" was replaced by something innocuous in the Post version, but reinstated when the poem appeared in a collection of Noyes' verse. "The Victory Ball" was turned into a symphonic poem by Ernest Schelling and into a ballet by Benjamin Zemach. In 1966, at the height of the Vietnam War, Congressman H. R. Gross, indignant at a White House dinner dance that went on until 3 a.m. while American soldiers were giving their lives, inserted Noyes' poem in the Congressional Record as bearing "directly on the subject matter in hand".
Middle years
In 1918, Noyes' short story collection, Walking Shadows: Sea Tales and Others, came out. It included both "The Lusitania Waits" and "The Log of the Evening Star". In 1924 Noyes published another collection, The Hidden Player, which included a novella, Beyond the Desert: A Tale of Death Valley, already published separately in America in 1920.For the Pageant of Empire at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, Noyes wrote a series of poems set to music by Sir Edward Elgar and known as Pageant of Empire. Among these poems was Shakespeare's Kingdom.
In 1929, Noyes published the first of his three novels, The Return of the Scare-Crow. A light-hearted story combining adventure, satire and comedy, it is about an earnest young clergyman named Basil. During a walk on the South Downs, Basil comes across a ruined cottage, where he decides to try sunbathing naked, as recommended by a friend. His clothes vanish, and he has to battle his way back to them through a series of mental hazards – all the latest intellectual fads and follies – and ends up rather less naïve than before.