Ralph Hodgson
Ralph Hodgson (
September 9 1871 –
November 3 1962) was an English poet, very popular in his lifetime on the strength of a small number of
anthology pieces, such as
The Bull. He was one of the more 'pastoral' of the
Georgian poets.
He seems to have covered his tracks in relation to much of his life; he was averse to publicity. This has led to claims that he was reticent. Far from that being the case, his friend
Walter De La Mare found him an almost exhausting talker; but he made a point of personal privacy. He kept up a copious correspondence with other poets and literary figures, including those he met in his time in Japan such as
Takeshi Saito.
He was born in
Darlington. From about 1890 he worked for a number of London publications. He was a comic artist, signing himself 'Yorick', and became art editor on
C. B. Fry's Weekly Magazine of Sports and Out-of-Door Life. His first poetry collection,
The Last Blackbird and Other Lines, appeared in 1907.
It is said that his father was a coal merchant, and that he ran away from home while at school.
In 1912 he founded a
small press,
At the Sign of the Flying Fame, with the
illustrator Claud Lovat Fraser (1890–1921) and the writer and journalist
Holbrook Jackson (1874–1948). It published his collection
The Mystery (1913). Hodgson received the
Edmond de Polignac Prize in 1914, for a musical setting of
The Song of Honour, and was included in the
Georgian Poetry anthologies. The press became inactive in 1914 as
World War I broke out and he and Lovat joined the armed forces (it did continue until 1923). Hodgson was in the
Royal Navy and then the
British Army. His reputation was established by
Poems (1917).
His first wife Janet (nee Chatteris) died in 1920. He then married Muriel Fraser (divorced 1932). Shortly after that he accepted an invitation to teach English at
Tohoku University in
Sendai,
Japan. In 1933 he married Lydia Aurelia Bolliger, an American missionary and teacher there.
In 1938 Hodgson left Japan, visited friends in the UK including
Siegfried Sassoon (they had met 1919) and then settled permanently with Aurelia in
Minerva, Ohio. He was involved there in publishing, under the
Flying Scroll imprint, and some academic contacts. He died in Minerva.
Arthur Bliss set some of his poems to music. His
Collected Poems appeared in 1961,
The Skylark (1959) having been his only new book in many decades.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen."
"The handwriting on the wall may be a forgery."
"Time, you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan just for one day?"
"Did anyone ever have a boring dream?"
