Gosse, Sir Edmund William

(1849-1928)

   Born in London, he was brought up in Devon by his father after his mother died. In his book Father and Son (1907) he describes the tension-ridden relationship with his father - a member of the Plymouth Brethren. He was liberated when Charles Kingsley, a friend of his father, secured his employment in the cataloguing section of the British Museum. He went on to translate three of Ibsen's plays and write literary histories, biographies, critical essays and many poems. From 1885 to 1890 he was Clark lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and from 1904 to 1914, librarian to the House of Lords. He was made Commander of the Bath in 1912 and was knighted in 1925. From 1918 until his death he wrote a series of weekly articles in the Sunday Times, selections of which are included in his Books on the Table (1921), and More Books on the Table (1923). Some of his other publications: Madrigals, Songs and Sonnets, 1879. New Poems, 1879. The Rose of Omar, 1893. Two Unpublished Poems, 1929. Some of his poems: "An invitation," "Epithalamium," "Illusion," "Impression."

   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). Poets' Corner, Sir Edmund William Gosse (http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/poem-gh.html). SETIS-English Poetry Collection (http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/poetry/browse/h-epdtoc.html). 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 Home Book of Modern Verse. Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed. Henry Holt, 1953. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, ed. W.W. Norton, 2000. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. Oxford University Press, 1971. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Symbolist Poem: The Development of the English Tradition. Edward Engelberg, ed. E.P. Dutton, 1967.