I lived from 1847-1922.
I was from England, and am in the English category.
Alice Meynell was born in 1847 to Thomas and Christiana (nee Weller) Thompson. Her only sibling, Elizabeth, was born a year earlier. Elizabeth, whom everyone called Mimi, was later to become Lady Elizabeth Butler, the celebrated painter. Mimi and Alice spent much of their childhood in Italy with their rather bohemian parents; Alice spoke fluent Genoese dialect to the end of her life, and was immensely proud of it. Throughout her childhood and adolescence she was plagued with often alarmingly ill health, and all through her life she suffered from migraine headaches, which she referred to as "wheels."
Read full description...
Alice Meynell's literary gifts charmed and inspired the greatest minds of her generation. Her protégé Francis Thompson wrote admiringly: "It is something to have won the admiration of men like Rossetti, Ruskin, Rossetti's bosom friend Theodore Watts, and, shall I add, the immortal Oscar Wilde." Coventry Patmore wrote that her poetry contained "that rarest of graces -- unsuperfluousness"; Ruskin called her work "perfectly heavenly"; she counted Aubrey de Vere and Lionel Johnson amongst her friends and Chesterton and de la Mare amongst her admirers.
She was for most of her adult life a journalist and essayist of prolific output and critical acclaim. Many of her essays, “Terse of Phraseology” and, “Limpid of Thought” still hold fascination for a modern audience. Her best known essay remains "The Rhythm of Life."
Her poetry spanned two centuries and has since fallen away from critical attention. Disciplined in expression.
Very frail in her last years, Alice Meynell died on the 27th of November, 1922, after a series of illnesses. She kept writing to the end of her life. In her own estimation her essays were of superior quality to her poems, and many of them are both penetrating and eloquent, but her husband never wavered in his belief that her poems were incomparable, and many others, from Tennyson to Chesterton to Walter de la Mare, have agreed.
(biography taken in part from www.people.virginia.edu/~feg5f/AM/am1.html)
Popular poetry
Along the graceless grass of town
They rake the rows of red and brown,
15 lines
My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,
Into thy garden; thine be happy hours
14 lines
On London fell a clearer light;
Caressing pencils of the sun
33 lines, 1 comment
O Spring, I know thee! Seek for sweet surprise
In the young children's eyes.
38 lines
I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
I shun the love that lurks in all delight--
14 lines, 1 comment
One wept whose only child was dead,
New-born, ten years ago.
9 lines
The Lady Poverty was fair:
But she has lost her looks of late,
18 lines
(I) PROMETHEUS 1-
IT was the south : mid-everything,
35 lines
Given, not lent,
And not withdrawn--once sent -
16 lines
Thou art the Way.
Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,
12 lines
Start a forum topic about this poet
|
