Background

In 1890 he became a clerk in the London office of the Anglo-American Oil Company, and there he worked for 18 years. Under the pseudonym "Walter Ramal," he published his first short story in the Sketch in 1895. His first volume of verse was Songs of Childhood (1902), and his first novel was Henry Brocken (1904). A small grant from the British government in 1908 and a subsequent pension enabled him to devote his full time to writing. His second novel, The Return (1910), won the Polignac Prize, and The Listeners, and Other Poems (1912) firmly established his reputation as a poet of delicacy, subtlety, and originality. In 1921 his fame was augmented by a noteworthy novel, Memoirs of a Midget. In his novels, short stories, and poems he is ceaselessly concerned with the supernatural, the fairy-like, the macabre, and the subtly naïve.naive. His interest in the child's perceptions led him to write many poems for children. His constant theme is the mysteriousness of experience and the awareness that the simplest event is shadowed by the inexplicable. His later works include The Traveller (1946), a long poem, Collected Tales (1949), Winged Chariot and Other Poems (1951), Private View (1953), a book of literary essays, and O Lovely England (1953), poems. He died at Twickenham on June 22, 1956.