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Roderic Quinn

Roderic Quinn (26 November 1867– 15 August 1949) was an Australian poet. Early life Quinn was the seventh child of Irish parents Edward Quinn, letter-carrier, and his wife Catherine. He was educated at Catholic schools where he met and formed life-long friendships with Christopher Brennan and E. J. Brady. Following school he studied law irregularly and taught for six months at Milbrulong Provisional Public School, near Wagga Wagga. After a short stint back in Sydney as a public servant he became editor of the North Sydney News. Career Quinn began publishing his poetry in The Bulletin during the 1890s and continued to do so for the rest of his life, writing over 1200 individual pieces in all. He published a novel, Mostyn Stayne in 1897, but it was not successful. He wrote a number of short stories during his career but does not appear to have returned to the novel length in his fiction. However it was poetry that was his first calling, and The Bulletin was his primary vehicle of publication. “In later days Quinn would turn up at The Bulletin each week with something which was called 'Rod Quinn’s rent poem’ which was bought but not often published.” Quinn was a leading member of the Dawn and Dusk Club in the 1890s, although in contrast to the club’s boisterous reputation he “had an air of courteous deference and a fine sense of humour.” He never married and supported himself from his writing. He died in Darlinghurst in 1949. He was the brother of Patrick Quinn and uncle of the writer Marjorie Quinn. Reviews Norman Lindsay observed: “Listening was his distinguished characteristic. He was a very tall man, so that with men of average height he had to bend a little to be on equal terms, and this bending gave him the air of couteous deference. the courtesy was genuine. he was a kindly man, for I never heard him say anything depreciative of others, either their works of their personalities.” Of his verse, The Western Mail referred to his “poetic genius” and stated that he “occupies a high place amongst lyricists of the Commonwealth”. Norman Lindsay summed up his work as follows: “That Rod was what he was defines the small place his poetry takes in this country’s literary tradition.” Novels Mostyn Stayne (1897) Collections The Hidden Tide (1899) The Circling Hearths (1901) A Southern Garland (1904) Poems (1920) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderic_Quinn

Francis Quarles

Francis Quarles (8 May 1592– 8 September 1644) was an English poet most famous for his Emblem book aptly entitled Emblems. Career Francis was born in Romford, Essex (now London Borough of Havering), and baptised there on 8 May 1592. He traced his ancestry to a family settled in England before the Norman Conquest with a long history in royal service. His great-grandfather, George Quarles, was Auditor to Henry VIII, and his father, James Quarles, held several places under Elizabeth I and James I, for which he was rewarded with an estate called Stewards in Romford. His mother, Joan Dalton, was the daughter and heiress of Eldred Dalton of Mores Place, Hadham. There were eight children in the family; the eldest, Sir Robert Quarles, was knighted by James I in 1608, and another, John Quarles, also became a poet. Francis was entered at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1608, and subsequently at Lincoln’s Inn. He was made cupbearer to the Princess Elizabeth, in 1613, remaining abroad for some years; and before 1629 he was appointed secretary to Ussher, the primate of Ireland. About 1633 he returned to England, and spent the next two years in the preparation of his Emblems. In 1639 he was made city chronologer, a post in which Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton had preceded him. At the outbreak of the Civil War he took the Royalist side, drawing up three pamphlets in 1644 in support of the king’s cause. It is said that his house was searched and his papers destroyed by the Parliamentarians in consequence of these publications. Quarles married Ursula Woodgate in 1618, by whom he had eighteen children. His son, John Quarles (1624–1665), was exiled to Flanders for his Royalist sympathies and was the author of Fons Lachrymarum (1648) and other poems. Quarles descendants, Charles Henry Langston and John Mercer Langston were American abolitionists who pressed for greater freedom and suffrages among the African Americans in the 19th century. Charles Henry Langston’s grandson (and Quarles’ descendant), Langston Hughes, was a celebrated author and poet during the Harlem Renaissance. The work by which Quarles is best known, the Emblems, was originally published in 1634, with grotesque illustrations engraved by William Marshall and others. The forty-five prints in the last three books are borrowed from the designs by Boetius à Bolswert for the Pia Desideria (Antwerp, 1624) of Herman Hugo. Each “emblem” consists of a paraphrase from a passage of Scripture, expressed in ornate and metaphorical language, followed by passages from the Christian Fathers, and concluding with an epigram of four lines. The Emblems was immensely popular with the common people, but the critics of the 17th and 18th centuries had no mercy on Quarles. Sir John Suckling in his Sessions of the Poets disrespectfully alluded to him as he “that makes God speak so big in’s poetry.” Pope in the Dunciad spoke of the Emblems, “Where the pictures for the page atone And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own.” Works * The works of Quarles include: * A Feast for Wormes. Set forth in a Poeme of the History of Jonah (1620), which contains other scriptural paraphrases, besides the one that furnishes the title; Hadassa; or the History of Queene Ester (1621) * Job Militant, with Meditations Divine and Moral (1624) * Sions Elegies, wept by Jeremie the Prophet (1624) * Sions Sonets sung by Solomon the King (1624), a paraphrase of the Canticles * The Historic of Samson (1631) * Alphabet of Elegies upon... Dr Aylmer (1625) * Argalus and Parthenia (1629), the subject of which is borrowed from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia * four books of Divine Fancies digested into Epigrams, Meditations and Observations (1632) * a reissue of his scriptural paraphrases and the Alphabet of Elegies as Divine Poems (1633) * Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638) * Memorials Upon the Death of Sir Robert Quarles, Knight (1639), in honor of his brother * Enchyridion, containing Institutions Divine and Moral (1640–41), a collection of four “centuries” of miscellaneous aphorisms * Observations concerning Princes and States upon Peace and Warre (1642) * Boanerges and Barnabas—Wine and Oyle for... afflicted Soules (1644–46), collection of miscellaneous reflections * three violent Royalist tracts (1644), The Loyal Convert, The Whipper Whipt, and The New Distemper, reissued in one volume in 1645 with the title of The Profest Royalist * his quarrel with the Times, and some elegies * Solomon’s Recantation... (1645), which contains a memoir by his widow * The Shepheards’ Oracles (1646) * a second part of Boanerges and Barnabas (1646) * a broadside entitled A Direfull Anathema against Peace-haters (1647) * an interlude, The Virgin Widow (1649). * An edition of the Emblems (Edinburgh, 1857) was embellished with new illustrations by CH Bennett and WA Rogers These are reproduced in the complete edition (1874) of Quarles included in the “Chertsey Worthies Library” by Dr AB Grosart, who provides an introductory memoir and an appreciation of Quarles’s value as a poet. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Quarles

Arthur Quiller-Couch

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (/ˌkwɪlərˈkuːtʃ/; 21 November 1863– 12 May 1944) was a Cornish writer who published using the pseudonym Q. Although a prolific novelist, he is remembered mainly for the monumental publication The Oxford Book Of English Verse 1250–1900 (later extended to 1918) and for his literary criticism. He influenced many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84, Charing Cross Road and its sequel, Q’s Legacy. His Oxford Book of English Verse was a favourite of John Mortimer’s fictional character Horace Rumpole. Life Quiller-Couch was born in the town of Bodmin, Cornwall, by the union of two ancient local families, the Quiller family and the Couch family, and was the third in a line of intellectuals from the Couch family. His younger sisters Florence Mabel and Lilian M. were also writers and folklorists. His father, Dr. Thomas Quiller Couch (d. 1884), was a noted physician, folklorist and historian. He married Mary Ford and lived at 63, Fore Street, Bodmin, until his death in 1884. His grandfather, Jonathan Couch, was an eminent naturalist, also a physician, historian, classicist, apothecary, and illustrator (particularly of fish). His son, Bevil Brian Quiller-Couch, was a war hero and poet, whose romantic letters to his fiancée, the poet May Wedderburn Cannan, were published in Tears of War. He also had a daughter, Foy Felicia, to whom Kenneth Grahame inscribed a first edition of his The Wind in the Willows attributing Quiller-Couch as the inspiration for the character Ratty. He was educated at Newton Abbot Proprietary College, at Clifton College, and Trinity College, Oxford, and later became a lecturer there. After being granted his degree in 1886 he was for a brief time classical lecturer at Trinity. After some journalistic experience in London, mainly as a contributor to the Speaker, he settled in 1891 at Fowey in Cornwall. In Cornwall he was an active political worker for the Liberal Party. He was knighted in 1910, and in 1928 was made a Bard of the Cornish cultural society Gorseth Kernow, adopting the Bardic name Marghak Cough ('Red Knight’). He was Commodore of the Royal Fowey Yacht Club from 1911 until his death. Quiller-Couch died in May 1944 after being hit by a jeep near his home in Cornwall in the preceding March. He is buried in Fowey’s parish church of St. Fimbarrus. Literary and academic career In 1887, while he was attending Oxford, he published Dead Man’s Rock, a romance in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and later Troy Town (1888), a comic novel set in a fictionalised version of his home town Fowey, and The Splendid Spur (1889). Quiller-Couch was well known for his story “The Rollcall of the Reef”, based on the wreck of HMS Primrose during 1809 on the Cornish coast. He published during 1896 a series of critical articles, Adventures in Criticism, and in 1898 he published a completion of Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished novel, St. Ives. From his Oxford time he was known as a writer of excellent verse. With the exception of the parodies entitled Green Bays (1893), his poetical work is contained in Poems and Ballads (1896). In 1895 he published an anthology from the 16th– and 17th-century English lyricists, The Golden Pomp, followed in 1900 by the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900. Later editions of this extended the period of concern to 1918 and it remained the leading general anthology of English verse until Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse appeared in 1972. In 1910 he published The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales from the Old French. He was the author of a number of popular novels with Cornish settings (collected edition as 'Tales and Romances’, 30 vols. 1928–29). He was appointed King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge in 1912, and retained the chair for the rest of his life. Simultaneously he was elected to a Fellowship of Jesus College, which he held until his death. His inaugural lectures as the professor of English literature were published as the book On the Art of Writing. His rooms were on staircase C, First Court, and known as the 'Q-bicle’. He supervised the beginnings of the English Faculty there—an academic diplomat in a fractious community. He is sometimes regarded as the epitome of the school of English literary criticism later overthrown by F. R. Leavis. Alistair Cooke was a notable student of Quiller-Couch and Nick Clarke’s semi-official biography of Cooke features Quiller-Couch prominently, noting that he was regarded by the Cambridge establishment as “rather eccentric” even by the university’s standards. Quiller-Couch was a noted literary critic, publishing editions of some of Shakespeare’s plays (in the New Shakespeare, published by Cambridge University Press, with Dover Wilson) and several critical works, including Studies in Literature (1918) and On the Art of Reading (1920). He edited a companion to his verse anthology: The Oxford Book of English Prose, which was published in 1923. He left his autobiography, Memories and Opinions, unfinished; it was nevertheless published in 1945. Legacy His Book of English Verse is often quoted by John Mortimer’s fictional character Horace Rumpole. Castle Dor, a re-telling of the Tristan and Iseult myth in modern circumstances, was left unfinished at Quiller-Couch’s death and was completed many years later by Daphne du Maurier. As she wrote in the Sunday Telegraph on April 1962, she began the job with considerable trepidation, at the request of Quiller-Couch’s daughter and “in memory of happy evenings long ago when 'Q’ was host at Sunday supper”. He features as a main character, played by Leo McKern, in the 1992 BBC television feature The Last Romantics. The story focuses on his relationship with his protégé, F. R. Leavis, and the students. His Cambridge inaugural lecture series, published as On the Art of Writing, is the source of the popular writers’ adage “murder your darlings”. He is mentioned briefly in The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde as one of the few authors with a name beginning with the letter “Q”. Works Fiction * Dead Man’s Rock (1887) * Troy Town (1888) * The Splendid Spur (1889) * The Blue Pavilions (1891) * Ia, and other tales (1896) * St Ives (1898), completing an unfinished novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. * Noughts and Crosses: Stories Studies and Sketches (1898) * The Ship of Stars (1899) * The Westcotes (1902) * Hetty Wesley (1903) (This was based on the life of the poet Mehetabel Wesley Wright) * The Adventures of Harry Revel (1903) * Fort Amity (1904) * The Shining Ferry (1905) * The Mayor of Troy (1906) * Sir John Constantine (1906) * Poison Island (1907) * True Tilda (1909) * A collected edition of Q’s fiction appeared as Tales and Romances (30 volumes, 1928–29). Verse * Green Bays (1893) * Poems and Ballads (1896) Criticism and anthologies * The Golden Pomp, a procession of English lyrics from Surrey to Shirley (1895) * Adventures in Criticism (1896) * Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900 also online (1900) * From a Cornish Window (1906) * English Sonnets (1910) * The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales from the Old French (1910) * The Oxford Book of Ballads (1911) * In Powder and Crinoline: Old Fairy Tales Retold (1913) * On the Art of Writing (1916) * Notes on Shakespeare’s Workmanship (1917) * Studies in Literature First Series and Second Series (1918) * On the Art of Reading (1920) * The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1922) * Oxford Book of English Prose (1923) Autobiography * Memories and Opinions (unfinished, published 1945) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Quiller-Couch




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