Bottomley, Gordon

(1874-1948)

   Bottomley was one of the Georgian poets, born in Yorkshire. He was a semi-invalid for most of his life, yet his poetic output was prolific. His first volume of poems, The Mickle Drede, was published in 1896, and he was included in Georgian Poetry by E. Marsh, 1912. He believed passionately that industrialization had massacred the beauty of English countryside. His work is heavily marked by strains of medievalism and the Bible. His main publications are: A Hymn of Touch, 1905. Babel: The Gate of God, 1907. A Hymn of Imagination, 1912. King Lear's Wife, 1915 (verse drama). In his poem "To Iron Founders and Others" he addresses factory owners and accuses them of making machines to make more machines, and in the process destroying every blade of grass and driving the birds out of sight. Some of his other poems: "A Song of Apple-Gathering," "Ardvorlich's Wife," "At the North Cape" (dedicated to Lascelles Abercrombie, 1938), "Atlantis," "Midnight Fires," "The Embarkation," "The End of the World," "The Maid of Arc," "The Sower," "The Viaduct."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Poems and Plays of Gordon Bottomley. Claude Colleer Abbott, ed. The Bodley Head, 1953. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbia grangers.org). The Literary Encyclopedia (www.LitEncyc.com). The Oxford Book of English Verse. Christopher Ricks, ed. Oxford University Press, 1999. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.