The Lyric Struggles of John Gawsworth

Abstract

He, without a penny May yet hold that pen Which turns disdain of many To the praise of all men.-John Gawsworth The late "John Gawsworth" (1912-70) was variously a weak poet, a good poet, an astute poetry editor, and a great poetry collector. Yet his posthumous legend centers on his lighthearted "kingdom" of Redonda, that Caribbean island that he never saw.1 * In literature, his horror fiction anthologies and campaigns for fantaisistes like Arthur Machen and M. P. Shiel are more remembered than his outof-print poems. Yet Gawsworth's poetry won him early praise, and he wrote con siderable verse right through the last year of his life, filling numerous notebooks many of which are now at Iowa. Surely his poems merit a second look. His long-continued battle for traditional lyrics should also find its place in an unbiased history of modern poetry. He was born in London as Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong. Part Irish and to a less extent Scottish ("Jacobite" he claimed), he never tired of listing his possible poetic ancestors, direct or remote-such as Mary Fytton of Gawsworth Hall, reportedly (but not actually) the "Dark Lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets-or Ben Jonson-or 1890's aesthete Lionel Johnson-or Milton's third wife. Though he hated school, never attending a university, he was proud of his graduation from the respected Merchant Taylors' School, where one of his idols had also gone, tragic Edwardian poet Richard Middleton. The school magazine published Armstrong's early bookish verses.