Wolfe, Humbert

(1886-1940)

   Born in Milan of Jewish parents but raised in Bradford, where his father was in the woolen business, he graduated in classics from Wadham College, Oxford, and was in the civil service from 1908 until he died. He was appointed Commander of the British Empire (1918) and Companion Order of the Bath in 1925. Leading up to World War II, so successful was he in managing the recruitment drive for civil defense, the Territorial Army, and the Auxiliary Fire Service, by the time war broke out in September more than 2,000,000 men and women had volunteered. His circulatory system, already vulnerable from high blood pressure and advanced arteriosclerosis, collapsed. He died on his birthday, 5 January 1940. Between his first collection of poetry, London Sonnets (1920), and his last, Out of Great Tribulation (1939), he wrote ten other collections, as well as essays, satires, textbooks, translations, a ballet and his autobiography, Now a Stranger (1933). Some of his poems: "After Battle," "Autumn," "Balder's Song," "Hilaire Belloc," "Sonnets to Helen," "The First Airman," "To Him Whom the Cap Fits."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. I Like You, If You Like Me: Poems of Friendship. Myra Cohn Livingston, ed. Macmillan, 1987. Shylock Reasons with Mr. Chesterton, by Humbert Wolfe. B. Blackwell, 1920. 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 Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs. Geoffrey Grigson, ed. Faber and Faber, 1977. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. World Poetry: An Antholog y of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time. Katharine Washburn and John S. Major, eds. Publisher, 1338, 1998.