English poet, playwright and critic, born at Leytonstone, Essex, on the 1st of June 1882 and educated at the Oxford high school. After twelve years’ work as an insurance clerk he began to devote himself to theatrical enterprise, and became manager and producer to the Pilgrim Players, who developed into the Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company. His first volume of poems appeared in 1908 and his first play Cophetua (in verse) in 1911. He subsequently published several volumes of verse, critical studies on William Morris (1912), Swinburne (1913) and others, and several plays, of which Abraham Lincoln (1918) was produced with great success both in London and in America. See also “We Willed it Not,” “Reciprocity,” “A Town Window,” “A Prayer,” “Invocation,” “Union” and “Sunrise on Rydal Water.”
