Trench, Frederic Herbert

(1865-1923)

   Irish poet, born at Avoncore, County Cork, he graduated in modern history from Keble College, Oxford, in 1888, and was elected fellow of All Souls College in 1889. From 1891 to 1900 he was examiner for the Board of Education, then artistic director at the Haymarket Theatre, London. In collaboration with Thomas Evelyn Scott-Ellis, 8th Baron Howard de Walden, he put on Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird (1909) and Ibsen's The Pretenders (1913). His four-act play Napoleon was produced by the Stage Society in 1919. The last ten years of his life were spent in Settignano, near Florence, and he died in hospital at Boulogne-sur-Mer. In 1908 an opera written by Joseph Holbrooke for Trench's poem "Apollo and the Seaman" was performed, under Thomas Beecham. Some other poems of his were set to music by Arnold Bax. Some of his poetry publications: Deirdre Wed and Other Poems, 1901. New Poems, 1907. Lyrics and Narrative Poems, 1911. Ode from Italy in Time of War, 1915. Poems, 1921. Some of his poems: "Advance on the Somme," "In the Roman Amphitheatre, Verona," "Song of the Vine," "The Queen of Gothland."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www. lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Irish Poets of To-Day. L. D'O. Walters, ed. T. Fisher Unwin, 1921. The National Portrait Gallery. (www.npg.org.uk). Poems with Fables in Prose by Herbert Trench, 3 Volume. Constable and Company, 1924. 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 Book of English Verse, 1250-1918. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. New edition, revised and enlarged, Oxford University Press, 1939. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).