Alfred Noyes
Alfred Noyes was an English poet born in Wolverhampton in 1880, known for being one of the most commercially successful poets of his time. He was the eldest son in a family where his father, a grocer turned teacher, emphasized education and self-sacrifice. Noyes attended Oxford University but left without a degree to focus on writing, as his first poetry collection garnered significant attention. He married Garnett Daniels in 1907, and their life together included time spent in the United States, where Noyes was well-connected in literary circles. After Garnett's death in 1926, he converted to Roman Catholicism and remarried Mary Angela Mayne Weld-Blundell, with whom he had three children. While he initially enjoyed critical acclaim and was recognized with honors such as being made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Noyes's work began to fall out of favor with the rise of Modernism post-World War I. Despite this decline in popularity, he continued to write until glaucoma left him blind, and he passed away in 1958 on the Isle of Wight.
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Alfred Noyes
Poet
- Born: September 16, 1880
- Birthplace: Wolverhampton, England
- Died: June 28, 1958
- Place of death: Isle of Wight, England
Biography
Alfred Noyes was born in Wolverhampton, England, in 1880, the eldest of three sons born to a grocer who later became a teacher and his invalid wife. Noyes’s father was a self-sacrificing man who gave up his own education and the chance to become an Anglican clergyman so that a younger brother could attend university. When his wife was invalided after the birth of her last child, he devoted himself to caring for her and their children. He taught Alfred to read Latin and Greek, and this instruction prepared his eldest son to easily enter Oxford University.
Noyes seems to have enjoyed his time at Oxford, although he left without taking a degree. He may have left prematurely owing to the success of his first poetry collection, published when he was twenty-one and still an undergraduate. When he married Garnett Daniels in 1907, the couple were able to live off of Noyes’s royalty checks, and he would go on to become the most commercially successful poet of his day. When the couple traveled to the United States in 1907, Noyes’s reputation was already such that they were entertained by friends and relations of America’s most celebrated poets. Garnett was an American, and the couple spent about a third of their time living in the United States. After she died in 1926, not having shared her knowledge of her impending death with him, Noyes converted to Roman Catholicism.
A year later he married for a second time and his new wife, Mary Angela Mayne Weld-Blundell, was a member of one of England’s most prominent Catholic families and a widowed single mother of a young daughter. Together she and Noyes would have three more children. Noyes continued to be prolific, popular, and esteemed by his peers, at least for the first two decades of his writing career. In 1918 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
However, when Modernism began to take hold of literary sensibilities in the wake of World War I, Noyes’s poetry began to seem trite, stiff, and uninteresting to critics and his fellow poets. Noyes returned the favor by panning the work of such innovators as T. S. Eliot. Even though time had in a sense passed him by, Noyes continued to write and publish poetry and prose until glaucoma rendered him blind a decade before his death. He died on June 28, 1958, at the Isle of Wight, England.