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Alfred Noyes |
Alfred Noyes grew up in Wales, and before the age of twenty-seven he published five books of poetry, including “The Highwayman”. When he was twenty-four he had taken rooms in a cottage in West Surrey, just south of London. It was a wild country then, and the sound of the wind in the pines gave him the first line of his most famous poem. He finished the rest in two days.
In 1914 Noyes, who had no college degree, began teaching poetry at Princeton where he continued until 1923. He returned to England, wrote several novels and a number of long narrative poems, then quietly retired. Nearly a hundred years later, in 1995, a BBC poll determined that “The Highwayman” was the 15th most popular poem in Britain.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |