Putting Poetry First, A Life of Robert Nichols 1893–1944

with two letters from the author

Author

Anne Charlton, and William Charlton

Publisher

Michael Russell, Norwich, 2003

Putting Poetry First, A Life of Robert Nichols 1893–1944

Printing Details

First edition, first printing. Hardback in dustwrapper. 24 × 16cm, 291pp.

This copy is from the library of Anne Powell, historian, anthologist and author on the First and Second World Wars and contains one handwritten and one typed letter signed from Anne Charlton, and a signed note from the publisher.

"The name of Robert Nichols has its place in the memorial in Westminster Abbey to the poets of the First World War, and his first collections, Invocations (1915) and Ardours and Endurances (1917), speaking directly to the mood of a nation in the throes of war, achieved real popular success. He went on to produce three more volumes of poetry, four plays that reached the London stage and two novels. He numbered among his friends many of the best known composers, authors, and actors of his day, and was himself a perceptive and articulate observer of the contemporary scene. As a result this first full study of his life and writings, drawing on a mass of unpublished letters, has much to divert and entertain. It shows him in Japan in the early 1920s, in Hollywood during an exciting phase in the development of the film industry, in Austria and Bavaria during the rise of Hitler, and escaping from France in 1940. He was only 51 when he died and his life was not a happy one, bad health went with an inability, despite a generous and affectionate nature, to form stable relationships with women. What is remarkable is the sometimes impractical single-mindedness with which he pursued his vocation as a poet. He believed he was born to write poetry and for him that always came first."