HOW FAME CAME.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 393, 27 March 1937, Page 5

HOW FAME CAME.

Words Pregnant and Living.

John Drinkwater was born in 1882 and educated at Oxford 'High School and Birmingham University. Circumstances forced him, When 19 years old, to enter an insurance office, where, as a clerk, he worked for 12 years, though not all the time with the one company. But even while earning a salary of only £35 a year, he began to write poetry and to interest himself in amateur theatricals and the writing of plays. He set out with a definite idea ot the poet's mission, which is, he said in one of his essays, “not to express his age, but to express himself.” He looked with favour on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of poetry as “the best words in the best order,” but with the saving qualification that the words should be pregnant and llv-

His first book ot verse, published jjL 1908, contained little of distinction or promise. Nor did his second volfixme display any marked advance on the first. But the volume he publlshe<J in 1914 made his name widely known as one of the foremost of England’s poets,. In that volume, which included “January Dusk,” “In Lady •Street,” “Reckoning.” and “A Prayer,” he : struck a note that was to remain with him throughout the rest of his lite.

Well as his poems have become known, it is in his plays that his fame mainly rests. In his early days he joined in founding the Pilgrim Players, since developed into the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and he wrote players to be produced there under his own direction. These were in blank verse and were not highly profitable. Then fame came to him in full measure with a play that was done in prose. The success of “Abraham Lincoln” (1918), a chronicle jilky. was so big and so Immediate that it carried him straightway into a full tide of popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. There followed such plays as “Oliver Cromwell” and “John Lac." Neither ot these, however, had the same success as “Abraham Lincoln.”