Turner, Walter James Redfern

(1889-1946)

   Born in Melbourne, Australia, where his father was the organist of St. Paul's Cathedral, he came to England in 1907 and spent several years traveling and working in Europe. He emerged from his service with the Royal Garrison Artillery during World War I as a recognized poet and member of the Georgian group, having published two volumes of poetry by 1918. Among his friends were Siegfried Sassoon and Ralph Hodgson, and later W.B .Yeats (see entries). He was music critic of the New Statesman, drama critic of the London Mercury, and literary editor of the Daily Herald, and of the Spectator from 1942 until his death, which occurred in his London home of cerebral hemorrhage. He wrote several novels and published a volume of poems every two or three years, several minor works of musical criticism, studies of Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, and Berlioz, and a satirical comedy The Man Who Ate the Popomack (1922). Some of his poems: "Clapham Common (or 'The Cap of Liberty')," "Clerks on Holiday," "In the Caves of Auvergne," "Sunflowers," "Talking with Soldiers," "The Hunter," "The Seven Days of the Sun."

   Sources: AustLit: The Resource for Australian Literature. Archives for W.J. Turner. (http://www.austlit.edu.au/run?ex=ShowAgent&agentId=AT7). Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. The National Portrait Gallery. (www.npg.org.uk). The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915-1955. Cecil Day Lewis and John Lehmann, eds. Chatto and Windus, 1966. 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 Dark Wind. Walter James Turner. E.P. Dutton, 1920. The Home Book of Modern Verse. Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed. Henry Holt, 1953. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. William Butler Yeats, ed. Oxford University Press, 1936. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.