Literary Birthday – 1 June – John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater was born on 1 June 1882 and died on 25 March 1937.

John Drinkwater Quotes

1. Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
2. A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
3. Poe’s saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.
4. The written word is everything.
5. The poet’s perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.

John Drinkwater was an English poet and dramatist. He was known before World War 1 as one of the Dymock poets, along with Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and others. After World War I, he achieved fame as a playwright and became closely associated with Birmingham Repertory Theatre. His plays included Abraham Lincoln, Mary Stuart, and Oliver Cromwell.

Source for Image: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Drinkwater_at_Pepys’_House.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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