W. H. Davies

William Henry Davies or W H Davies (3 July 1871 – 26 September 1940) was a Welsh poet and writer.

The People's Poet

He spent a significant part of his life as a tramp or vagabond in the United States and United Kingdom, but became known as one of the most popular poets of his time. The prinicpal themes in Davies' work are the marvels of nature, observations about life's hardships, his own tramping adventures and the various characters he met. Davies is usually considered as one of the Georgian poets, although much of his work is atypical of the style and themes adopted by others of the genre.

Early life

Plaque commemorating Davies' birthplace at The Church House Inn, Newport.

The son of an iron-moulder, Davies was born at 6 Portland Street in the Pillgwenlly district of Newport, Monmouthshire and a busy port. His father died when he was just two years old. When his mother remarried she agreed that care of the three children should pass to their paternal grandparents who ran the nearby Church House Inn at 14, Portland Street. His grandfather Francis Boase Davies, originally from Cornwall, had been a sea captain.

Davies was related to the famous British actor Sir Henry Irving (referred to as cousin Brodribb by the family).

In his 1918 "Poet's Pilgimage" Davies recounts the time when, at the age of 14, he had been left `with orders' to sit with his dying grandfather. He missed the final moments of his grandfather's passing as he had been too engrossed in reading "...a very interesting book of wild adventure".. This revealing anecdote betrayed the passion Davies was to have all his life, despite his humble background, for the written word.

Delinquent to Supertramp

After finishing school in disgrace at the age of 15 (having been given twelve stokes of the birch for shoplifting with a gang of school-mates), his grandmother signed the papers for Davies to become an apprentice to a local picture-frame maker. Davies never enjoyed the craft, however, and never settled into any regular work. He was a difficult and somewhat delinquent young man, and made repeated requests to his grandmother to lend him the money to sail to America. When these were all refused, he eventually left Newport, took casual work and started to travel. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) covers his life during his travelling and included many adventures and characters in the USA 1893-99, where he lived as a tramp. During this period he crossed the Atlantic at least seven times working on cattle ships. He travelled widely, through many of the States, sometimes begging, sometimes taking seasonal work, but often ending up spending any savings on a drinking spree with a fellow traveller. At one stage, on his way to Memphis, Tennessee he lay alone in a swamp for three days and nights suffering from malaria.

The great turning point in Davies' life came when he read in England of the riches to be made in the Klondike and immediately set off to make his fortune in Canada. Attempting to jump a freight train at Renfrew, Ontario, however, with fellow tramp Three-fingered Jack, he lost his footing and his right foot was crushed under the wheels of the train. The leg later had to be amputated below the knee and he wore a wooden leg thereafter. Davies' biographers have agreed that the significance of the accident should not be underestimated, even though Davies himself played down the story. Moult dramatically begins his biography with the incident and Stonesifer has suggested that this event more than any other led Davies to become a professional poet..

Davies' view of his own disability can be traced to his 1913 poem The Fog, published in Foliage where the blind man leading the poet through the fog shows the reader that one who is severely handicapped in one domain may well have a considerable advantage in another.

Published Poet

He returned to England, living a rough life, particularly in London shelters and doss-houses. So desperate was he to compose that, fearing the contempt of his fellow tramps, he would often feign slumber in the corner of his doss-house, mentally composing his poems and only later committing them to paper in private. So desperate was he to see his work in print that at one stage he borrowed the money to have his poems printed on loose sheets of paper which he then tried to sell door-to-door through the streets of residential London. When this enterprise failed miserably, he returned to his lodgings and, in a fit of rage, burned all of the printed sheets in the fire.

His first book of poetry was published in 1905, again with the help of Davies' own savings and proved to be the beginning of success and a growing reputation. In order to even get "The Soul's Destroyer" published Davies had to forego his allowance and live the life of a tramp for six months (with the manuscript of the book hidden in his pocket), just to secure a loan of funds from his inheritance. When eventually published the volume was largely ignored and he resorted to posting individual copies by hand to prospective wealthy customers chosen from the pages of "Who's Who". He eventually managed to sell 60 of the 200 copies printed.

On 12 October 1905 he met Edward Thomas, then literary critic for the Daily Chronicle in London, who was to do more to help Davies than anyone else. Thomas rented a tiny two-roomed cottage for Davies not far from his own home at Elses Farm near Sevenoaks in Kent. Davies moved to the cottage from Newport, via London, in the second week of February 1907. On one occasion Thomas had to arrange for the manufacture, by a local wheelwright, of a makeshift wooden leg for Davies.

In 1907 the manusript of "The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp" drew the attention of George Bernard Shaw, who agreed to write a preface (largely through the concerted efforts of his wife Charlotte). It was only because of Bernard Shaw that Davies' contract with the publishers was re-written to allow the author to retain the serial rights, all rights after three years, royalties of fifteen per cent of selling price and a non-returnable advance of twenty five pounds. Davies was also to be given a say on the style of all illustations, advertisement layouts and cover designs. The original publisher, Duckworth and Sons, refused to accept these demands and so the book was placed instead with London publisher Fifield.

In 1911 Davies was awarded a Civil List Pension of £50, later increased to £100 and then again to £150.

Society Life in London

After lodging at a number of temporary addresses in Sevenoaks, Davies moved back to London early in 1914, settling eventually at 14, Great Russell Street in the Bloomsbury district (previously the residence of one Charles Dickens). Here in a tiny two-room apartment, initially infested with mice and rats, and next door to rooms occupied by a noisy Belgian prostitute, he lived from early 1916 until 1921.

It was during this time in London that Davies embarked on a series of public readings of his work, alongside such others as Hillaire Belloc and W. B. Yeats, impressing such fellow poets as Ezra Pound. He soon found that he was able to socialise with leading society figures of the day, including Lord Balfour and Lady Randolph Churchill.

Whilst in London Davies also became friendly with a number of artists including Jacob Epstein, Harold Knight, Nina Hamnett, Laura Knight, Augustus John, Harold Gilman, William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert, Sir William Nicholson and Osbert and Edith Sitwell.

In his poetry Davies drew extensively for material on his experiences with the seamier side of life, but also on his love of nature. By the time of his prominent place in the Edward Marsh Georgian poetry series, he was an established figure. He is generally best known for two lines from his poem, Leisure, first published in "Songs Of Joy and Others" in 1911:

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

In the last months of 1921 Davies moved to more confortable quarters at 13, Avery Row, Brook Street, where he rented rooms from the Quaker poet Olaf Baker. He began to find prolonged work difficult, however, suffering from increased bouts of rheumatism and other ailments.

Marriage and later life

Davies' last home "Glendower" at Watledge, Nailsworth.

On 5 February 1923 Davies married Helen Payne, his junior by three decades, at the Registry Office in East Grinstead, Sussex and the couple set up home in the town at "Tor Leven", Cantelupe Road. His posthumous book "Young Emma" was his frank and often disturbing account of his life before and after picking her up in the street as a prostitute in the Edgware Road near Marble Arch. The book was published only in 1980 after her death in 1979. They lived quietly and happily, moving from East Grinstead, first to Sevenoaks, then to Malpas House Oxted in Surrey and finally settling at a series of five different residences at Nailsworth in Gloucestershire. The first of these was the comfortable nineteenth century stone house "Shenstone" and the last the small roadside cottage "Glendower" in the hamlet of Watledge.

"Later Days", the 1925 sequel to "The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp", describes the beginnings of Davies' career as a writer and his acquaintance with Belloc, Shaw and de la Mare, amongst many others. In 1926 Davies was honoured with the degree of Doctor Litteris, honoris causa from the University of Wales.

Davies returned to his native Newport in September 1938 for the unveiling of a plaque in his honour at the Church House Inn with an address given by the Poet Laureate John Masefield. He was unwell, however, and this proved to be his last public appearance. His health deteriorated, not helped by the weight of his wooden leg, and he died in September 1940 at the age of 69. No longer a church or chapel-goer by the end of his life, Davies was cremated at Cheltenham and his remains interred there.

A controversial statue by Paul Bothwell-Kincaid, inspired by the poem "Leisure", was unveiled in Commercial Street, Newport in December 1990 to commemorate Davies' work, on the 50th anniversary of his death.

The sculpture of Davies by Epstein, from January 1917, regarded by many as the most accurate artistic impression of Davies and a copy of which Davies owned himself, may be found at Newport Museum and Art Gallery.

Literary style

Stonesifer likens the quality of Davies' prose, with its often childlike realism, directness and simplicity, to that of Defoe and George Borrow, while Davies' style was described by Shaw as that of "a genuine innocent".

For his honorary degree in 1926, Davies was introduced to the assembly at the University of Wales by Professor W. D. Thomas, M.A. with a citation that may still serve as a valid summary of Davies' literary themes, style and tone:

"... a Welshman, a poet of distinction, and a man in whose work much of the peculiarly Welsh attitude to life is expressed with singular grace and sincerity. He combines a vivid sense of beauty with affection for the homely, keen zest for life and adventure with a rare appreciation of the common, universal pleasures, and finds in those simple things of daily life a precious quality, a dignity and a wonder that consecrate them. Natural, simple and unaffected, he is free from sham in feeling and artifice in expression. He has re-discovered for those who have forgotten them, the joys of simple nature. He has found romance in that which has become commonplace; and of the native impulses of an unspoilt heart, and the responses of a sensitive spirit, he has made a new world of experience and delight. He is a lover of life, accepting ot and glorying in it. He affirms values that were falling into neglect, and in an age that is mercenary reminds us that we have the capacity for spiritual enjoyment."

Somewhat surprisingly, his great friend and mentor, Edward Thomas, likened Davies to Wordsworth, writing:

"He can write commonplace or inaccurate English, but it is also natural to him to write, such as Wordsworth wrote, with the clearness, compactness and felicity which make a man think with shame how unworthily, through natural stupidity or uncertainty, he manages his native tongue. In subtlety he abounds, and where else today shall we find simplicity like this?"

Works

• The Soul's Destroyer and Other Poems (of the author, The Farmhouse, 1905) (also Fifield, 1906 and Alston Rivers, 1907)
• New Poems (Elkin Mathews, 1907)
• Nature Poems (Fifield, 1908)
• The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (Fifield, 1908) (autobiographical)
• How It Feels to be Out of Work (English Review 1, Dec 1908)
• Beggars (Duckworth, 1909) (autobiographical)
• Farewell to Poesy (Fifield, 1910)
• Songs of Joy and Others (Fifield, 1911)
• A Weak Woman (Duckworth, 1911)
• The True Traveller (Duckworth, 1912) (autobiographical)
• Foliage: Various Poems (Elkin Mathews, 1913)
• Nature (Batsford, 1914)
• The Bird of Paradise (Methuen, 1914)
• Child Lovers (Fifield, 1916)
• Collected Poems (Fifield, 1916)
• A Poet's Pilgrimage (or A Pilgrimage In Wales) (Melrose, 1918)
• Forty New Poems (Fifield, 1918)
• Raptures (Beaumont Press, 1918)
• The Song of Life (Fifield, 1920)
• The Captive Lion and Other Poems (Yale University Press, 1921)
• The Soul's Destroyer (Jonathan Cape, 1921)
• Form (ed Davies and Austin O Spare, Vol 1, Numbers 1, 2 & 3, 1921/1922)
• The Hour of Magic (illustrated by Sir William Nicholson, Jonathan Cape, 1922)
• Shorter Lyrics of the Twentieth Century, 1900-1922 (ed Davies, Bodley Head, 1922) (anthology)
• True Travellers. A Tramp's Opera in Three Acts (illustrated by Sir William Nicholson, Jonathan Cape, 1923)
• Collected Poems, 1st Series (Jonathan Cape, 1923)
• Collected Poems, 2nd Series (Jonathan Cape, 1923)
• Selected Poems (Jonathan Cape, 1923)
• `Poets and Critics' - New Statesman, 21, (Sept 8th 1923)
• What I Gained and Lost By Not Staying At School (Teachers World 29, June 1923)
• Secrets (Cape, 1924)
• Moll Flanders, introduction by Davies (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co, 1924)
• A Poet's Alphabet (Jonathan Cape, 1925)
• Later Days (Jonathan Cape, 1925) (autobiographical)
• Augustan Book of Poetry: Thirty Selected Poems (Benn, 1925)
• The Song of Love (Jonathan Cape, 1926)
• The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp (Jonathan Cape, 1926) (autobiographical)
• A Poet's Calendar (Jonathan Cape, 1927)
• Dancing Mad (Jonathan Cape, 1927)
• The Collected Poems of W. H. Davies (Jonathan Cape, 1928)
• Moss and Feather (Faber and Gwyer, 1928)
• Forty Nine Poems (selected and illustrated by Jancynth Parsons, Medici Society, 1928)
• Selected Poems (arranged by Ecward Garnett, introduction by Davies, Gregynog Press, 1928)
• Ambition and Other Poems (Jonathan Cape, 1929)
• Jewels Of Song (Jonathan Cape, 1930)
• In Winter (Fytton Armstrong, 1931)
• Poems 1930-31 (Jonathan Cape, 1931)
• The Lover's Song Book (Gregynog Press, 1933)
• My Birds (with engravings by Hilda M. Quick, Jonathan Cape, 1933)
• My Garden (Jonathan Cape, 1933)
• `Memories' - School, (1, Nov 1933)
• The Poems of W. H. Davies: A Complete Collection (Jonathan Cape, 1934)
• Love Poems (Jonathan Cape, 1935)
• The Birth of Song (Jonathan Cape, 1936)
• `Epilogue' to The Romance of the Echoing Wood, (a Welsh tale by W. J. T. Collins, R. H. Johns Ltd, 1937)
• The Loneliest Mountain (Jonathan Cape, 1939)
• Collected Poems (Jonathan Cape, 1940)
• Common Joys and Other Poems (Faber and Faber, 1941)
• Complete Poems of W. H. Davies (Jonathan Cape, 1962)
• Young Emma (Jonathan Cape, 1980) (autobiographical)

A complete list of work published by Davies, his broadcast material, and publications about him, is given in Harlow (1993).

External links

• Works by W. H. Davies at Project Gutenberg
• BBC South East Wales Arts report
• A collection of items relating to W. H. Davies
• Article in the Literary Encyclopedia
• WH at 100 Welsh Heroes
• Davies' well-known work 'Leisure' and description

References

• Hockey, L. (1971), W. H. Davies, University of Wales Press (on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council), (limited edition of 750).

• Hooper, B. (2004), Time to Stand and Stare: A Life of W. H. Davies with Selected Poems, London, Peter Owen Ltd., ISBN 0-72061-205-5.

• Harlow, S. (1993), W. H. Davies - a Bibliography, Winchester, Oak Knoll Books, St.Paul's Bibliographies. ISBN 1-873040-00-8.

• Moult, T. (1934), W. H. Davies, Thornton Butterworth.

• Normand, L. (2003), W. H. Davies, Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press Ltd, ISBN 1-85411-260-0

• Stonesifer, R.J. (1963), W. H. Davies - A Critical Biography, London, Jonathan Cape. (first full biography of Davies), ISBN B0000CLPA3.