Background
He was born at Preston, Lancashire, on December 18, 1859, the son of converts to Roman Catholicism. His childhood was painful, but he had hours of contented leisure, during which he read Scott, Coleridge, and Shakespeare.
(The Hound of Heaven By Francis Thompson)
The Hound of Heaven By Francis Thompson
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He was born at Preston, Lancashire, on December 18, 1859, the son of converts to Roman Catholicism. His childhood was painful, but he had hours of contented leisure, during which he read Scott, Coleridge, and Shakespeare.
In 1870 he entered Ushaw Seminary, Durham, where his shyness and frail body brought upon him the ridicule of his schoolmates; in 1874 he transferred to Ushaw College to study for the priesthood, but when he graduated in 1877 the president of the school wrote that Thompson's "nervous timidity" unfitted him for that calling.
Despite his increasing interest in poetry, he acceded to his father's urging to study medicine at Owens College, Manchester.
A severe fever in 1879 was possibly the occasion of his first taking laudanum, and after six years of failure at Owens he fled to London in 1885, where he lived for two years in great poverty. From a life of match selling, cab calling, and laudanum drinking he was rescued by Wilfrid Meynell, editor of Merry England. Meynell helped him to regain partial health and published his essays and poems, notably The Hound of Heaven (1890). Thompson was moderately happy during the rest of his life under the care of Meynell and his wife, Alice, also a writer, and he earned a modest living by journalism.
In 1893 he published his Poems, on which his fame chiefly rests; this was followed by Sister Songs (1895), New Poems (1897), and a prose work, Health and Holiness (1905). His famous essay on Shelley (1889) was posthumously published in 1908. Thompson died of tuberculosis in London on Nov. 13, 1907.
Thompson's poetry "seethes with imagery, " as its author said, and is an odd combination of Shelley and Crashaw, with touches of Coleridge, De Quincey, and, in late poems, Coventry Patmore, his friend. Though Thompson could write simply and tenderly, his verse is most original when it is turbulent, fantastic, and involuted.
(The Hound of Heaven By Francis Thompson)
