Stevenson, Robert Louis

(1850-1894)

   He was a Scottish poet, born in Edinburgh, the son of a lighthouse engineer, who from about his eighteenth year dropped the use of his third Christian name, Balfour, and changed the spelling of Lewis to Louis. He was an imaginative child whose inner child never aged. In spite of suffering from tuberculosis he was a great traveler and attended classes at Edinburgh University when health permitted. After purchasing a plantation on Samoa, he became a kind of chief among the Samoans, who christened him "Tusitala," meaning "storyteller." He died of an apparent stroke. His novels of adventure, romance, and horror are of considerable psychological depth and have continued in popularity long after his death, both as books and as films. Two of his poems are "Requiem," which describes the place where he died in Samoa, and "Sing Me a Song of a Lad That is Gone," which records memories of sailing past the Hebrides, off western Scotland, in 1874. Some of his other poems: "Bright is the Ring of Words," "The Canoe Speaks," "The Light-Keeper," "The Swing," "To an Island Princess," "To Princess Kaiulani," "To the Stormy Petrel," "Winter."

   Sources: Complete Collection of Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson (http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/stevenson/stevenson.html). Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Everyman's Book of Victorian Verse. J.R. Watson, ed. J.M. Dent, 1982. Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Sprints and Distances: Sports in Poetry and the Poetry in Sport. Lillian Morrison, ed. Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson; Vailima Edition (8 volumes). William Heinemann and Chatto W., 1922. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).