Norman Gale


Norman Rowland Gale was a poet, novelist and reviewer, who published many books over a period of nearly fifty years.
Gale was born in Kew, Surrey. He entered Exeter College, Oxford in 1880 and graduated in 1884. He was a teacher for some years, but in 1892 he began writing full-time. His poems "Betrothed" and "The Call" appeared in The Yellow Book. His best-known poem is probably "The Country Faith", which is in The Oxford Book of English Verse. In the United States, Louis Untermeyer included it in his anthology Modern British Poetry, and, with a change of title to "Life in the Country", it opened the second reader in Cora Wilson Stewart's series, Country Life Readers.
For the last two years of his life Gale lived in Headley Down, Hampshire, where he died at the age of eighty.

Publications

A Country Muse, 1892; reprinted with additions as A Country Muse: First Series, 1894A Country Muse: New Series, 1893; reprinted with additions as A Country Muse: Second Series, 1895Orchard Songs, A June Romance, 1894Cricket Songs, 1894All Expenses Paid, 1895Songs for Little People, 1896Poems by John Clare, 1901Barty's Star, 1903More Cricket Songs, 1905 A Book of Quatrains, 1909Song in September, 1912Solitude, 1913Collected Poems, 1914The Candid Cuckoo, 1918A Merry-go-Round of Song, 1919Verse in Bloom, 1925A Flight of Fancies, 1926Messrs Bat and Ball, 1930Close of Play, 1936Remembrances, 1937Love-in-a-Mist, 1939