Watson, Sir (John) William (1858–1935), poet and literary critic
by James G. Nelson
© Oxford University Press 2004–14 All rights reserved
Watson, Sir (John) William (1858–1935), poet and literary critic, was born on 2 August 1858 at Peel Place, Burley in Wharfedale, Yorkshire, the youngest son of three sons of John Watson (d. 1887), master grocer, and his wife, Dorothy, née Robinson.
From a young age Watson, who grew up in Liverpool, showed an unusual susceptibility to literary and musical influences. His first volume, The Prince's Quest and other Poems, was published in April 1880. Possessed of an extraordinarily retentive memory, Watson laced his poems—as he did so much of his later verse—with echoes, motifs, rhythms, and diction of his favoured Romantic and Victorian poets. Although Dante Gabriel Rossetti praised the title poem, reviews of Watson's first book were few and none shared Rossetti's enthusiasm.
The failure of his early poetry to attract attention brought about a new Watson, a poet who turned away from the highly subjective, Romantic verse of his early years and embraced, instead, a disciplined, more objective craft. Moreover, his subject matter in future would deal, primarily, with two themes: the decline of traditional modes and values in literature and the political and social shortcomings of his own times. Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature, which appeared in January 1884, exhibited this major shift in direction.
Having disciplined himself by achieving perfection of form within the narrow compass of the epigram, Watson completed his transformation by turning outward to the sphere of politics in June 1885 when he published a series of sonnets, Ver tenebrosum, in the National Review. Following in the tradition of Milton and Wordsworth, Watson chose the sonnet as a means of upbraiding Britain for its unjust actions in the Sudan and for its weak, indecisive response to Russia's hostile moves in Afghanistan.
The full impact of Watson's reorientation is evident in his finest poem, ‘Wordsworth's Grave', completed in 1887. This elegy serves as both a lament for the poetry of the past and an attack on the ‘misbegotten strange new gods of song'—the young poets and artists of an aesthetic and / or decadent persuasion. It was his growing reputation as a defender against ‘the tendency of English verse … all towards obscurities, affectations, eccentricities' (G. Allen, ‘Note on a new poet', Fortnightly Review, Aug 1891) that placed Watson in strong contention for the poet laureateship after the death of Alfred Tennyson in 1892. His series of essays Excursions in Criticism (1893) further consolidated his artistic beliefs.
In 1895, with the arrest of Oscar Wilde on suspicion of sodomy, Watson led the fight to remove Aubrey Beardsley from the art editorship of the Bodley Head's new magazine, the Yellow Book. His power and influence now at its height, Watson published The Father of the Forest and other Poems in November.
Increasingly bedevilled by bouts of creative inactivity, Watson nevertheless managed to produce several books of poetry during the later 1890s: The Purple East (1896), The Year of Shame (1897), and The Hope of the World (1898), which included his most famous lyric, ‘April, April'. His premier work of the new century appeared in 1902, the celebrated Ode on the Day of the Coronation of King Edward VII.
On 16 December 1904 John Lane published The Poems of William Watson in two volumes with an introduction by John Alfred Spender, the editor of the Westminster Gazette, in which Watson's august position as a man of letters was clearly indicated in the opening lines by Spender's cautiously worded apology for standing between ‘the public and a poet of Mr. Watson's eminence'. Yet the poet already was in a decline even more astonishing than his rise to fame. Inextricably tied to the poetic tradition of the old century, Watson, unable or unwilling to change his stance, rapidly found himself adrift from the poetic mainstream of the twentieth century. Increasingly pessimistic and disheartened by his loss of popularity, Watson thought of himself as an exile, the theme of his prose work The Muse in Exile (1913).
Despite the fact that his views as well as his poetry were out of step with the modernist trends in literature, Watson continued to bring out books of poetry. New Poems (1909) included the viciously satirical poem ‘The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue' (a scarcely disguised attack on Prime Minister Asquith's wife, Margot, and his daughter, Violet). On 11 August 1909, after a two-week courtship, Watson married Adeline Maureen, née Pring (1885–1972). They had two daughters. Various other volumes followed including Sable and Purple (1910), his drama Heralds of the Dawn (1912), his prose essay Pencraft (1917), and Retrogression and other Poems (1917).
Also in 1917 Watson published The Man who Saw and other Poems Arising out of the War. The title poem, a tribute to the wartime prime minister, David Lloyd George, earned Watson a knighthood, bestowed on 4 June 1917. His final poetic efforts were the long poem The Superhuman Antagonists (1919), which espoused a guarded meliorism, two short volumes of verse (1919) in support of the Irish rising: Ireland Unfreed and Ireland Arisen, and Poems Brief and New (1925).
When Sir William Watson died on 12 August 1935 in a nursing home, Limes Convalescent Home, at Ditchling Common, Sussex, he was almost totally forgotten and many were surprised that he had survived so long into the century. He was buried on 16 August in the family tomb in Childwall churchyard, Childwall Abbey, Liverpool.
JAMES G. NELSON
Sources J. G. Nelson, Sir William Watson (1966) · W. E. Swayze, ‘The early career of Sir William Watson, 1858–1905', PhD Diss., Yale U., 1951 · J. M. Wilson, I was an English poet: a biography of Sir William Watson (1981) · M. Watson, ‘England are you proud', Yale U., Watson Collection [biography of W. Watson]
Archives Bodl. Oxf., corresp. and papers incl. literary MSS · Hunt. L., letters and literary MSS · Yale U., Beinecke L., papers | BL, corresp. with William Archer, Add. MS 54297 · BL, corresp. with Sir Sydney Cockerell, Add. MS 52758 · BL, letters to G. L. Craik, Add. MS 61895 · BL, letters to Macmillans, Add. MS 61895 · BL, corresp. of him and his executors with the Society of Authors, Add. MS 56841 · BLPES, letters to A. G. Gardiner · Bodl. Oxf., letters to A. C. Benson · Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with John Lane · Bodl. Oxf., Walpole ‘Nineties' Collection · CAC Cam., corresp. with Lord Fisher · CUL, letters to E. H. Blakeney · L. Cong., Watson material · NL Scot., letters to Sir Herbert Grierson · Ransom HRC, corresp. with John Lane · TCD, corresp. with Edward Dowden · U. Leeds, corresp. with Sir Edmund Gosse · U. Leeds, Brotherton L., collection · U. Lpool L., letters to W. B. Nichols · U. Newcastle, Robinson L., letters to Frederic Whyte · U. Reading, letters to Charles Elkin Mathews
Likenesses R. G. Eves, oils, 1929?, NPG · S. W. Andrews, drawing (aged thirty-five), Yale U. · M. Beerbohm, caricature, drawing, Princeton University Library, New Jersey · Elliott & Fry, cabinet photograph, NPG · London Stereoscopic Co., cabinet photograph, NPG · J. Russell & Sons, photograph, NPG · photograph (aged fifty), Yale U.
© Oxford University Press 2004–14 All rights reserved
James G. Nelson, ‘Watson, Sir (John) William (1858–1935)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36774, accessed 1 July 2014]
Sir (John) William Watson (1858–1935): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36774
Watson, Sir (John) William (1858–1935), poet and literary critic
by James G. Nelson
© Oxford University Press 2004–14 All rights reserved
Watson, Sir (John) William (1858–1935), poet and literary critic, was born on 2 August 1858 at Peel Place, Burley in Wharfedale, Yorkshire, the youngest son of three sons of John Watson (d. 1887), master grocer, and his wife, Dorothy, née Robinson.
From a young age Watson, who grew up in Liverpool, showed an unusual susceptibility to literary and musical influences. His first volume, The Prince's Quest and other Poems, was published in April 1880. Possessed of an extraordinarily retentive memory, Watson laced his poems—as he did so much of his later verse—with echoes, motifs, rhythms, and diction of his favoured Romantic and Victorian poets. Although Dante Gabriel Rossetti praised the title poem, reviews of Watson's first book were few and none shared Rossetti's enthusiasm.
The failure of his early poetry to attract attention brought about a new Watson, a poet who turned away from the highly subjective, Romantic verse of his early years and embraced, instead, a disciplined, more objective craft. Moreover, his subject matter in future would deal, primarily, with two themes: the decline of traditional modes and values in literature and the political and social shortcomings of his own times. Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature, which appeared in January 1884, exhibited this major shift in direction.
Having disciplined himself by achieving perfection of form within the narrow compass of the epigram, Watson completed his transformation by turning outward to the sphere of politics in June 1885 when he published a series of sonnets, Ver tenebrosum, in the National Review. Following in the tradition of Milton and Wordsworth, Watson chose the sonnet as a means of upbraiding Britain for its unjust actions in the Sudan and for its weak, indecisive response to Russia's hostile moves in Afghanistan.
The full impact of Watson's reorientation is evident in his finest poem, ‘Wordsworth's Grave', completed in 1887. This elegy serves as both a lament for the poetry of the past and an attack on the ‘misbegotten strange new gods of song'—the young poets and artists of an aesthetic and / or decadent persuasion. It was his growing reputation as a defender against ‘the tendency of English verse … all towards obscurities, affectations, eccentricities' (G. Allen, ‘Note on a new poet', Fortnightly Review, Aug 1891) that placed Watson in strong contention for the poet laureateship after the death of Alfred Tennyson in 1892. His series of essays Excursions in Criticism (1893) further consolidated his artistic beliefs.
In 1895, with the arrest of Oscar Wilde on suspicion of sodomy, Watson led the fight to remove Aubrey Beardsley from the art editorship of the Bodley Head's new magazine, the Yellow Book. His power and influence now at its height, Watson published The Father of the Forest and other Poems in November.
Increasingly bedevilled by bouts of creative inactivity, Watson nevertheless managed to produce several books of poetry during the later 1890s: The Purple East (1896), The Year of Shame (1897), and The Hope of the World (1898), which included his most famous lyric, ‘April, April'. His premier work of the new century appeared in 1902, the celebrated Ode on the Day of the Coronation of King Edward VII.
On 16 December 1904 John Lane published The Poems of William Watson in two volumes with an introduction by John Alfred Spender, the editor of the Westminster Gazette, in which Watson's august position as a man of letters was clearly indicated in the opening lines by Spender's cautiously worded apology for standing between ‘the public and a poet of Mr. Watson's eminence'. Yet the poet already was in a decline even more astonishing than his rise to fame. Inextricably tied to the poetic tradition of the old century, Watson, unable or unwilling to change his stance, rapidly found himself adrift from the poetic mainstream of the twentieth century. Increasingly pessimistic and disheartened by his loss of popularity, Watson thought of himself as an exile, the theme of his prose work The Muse in Exile (1913).
Despite the fact that his views as well as his poetry were out of step with the modernist trends in literature, Watson continued to bring out books of poetry. New Poems (1909) included the viciously satirical poem ‘The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue' (a scarcely disguised attack on Prime Minister Asquith's wife, Margot, and his daughter, Violet). On 11 August 1909, after a two-week courtship, Watson married Adeline Maureen, née Pring (1885–1972). They had two daughters. Various other volumes followed including Sable and Purple (1910), his drama Heralds of the Dawn (1912), his prose essay Pencraft (1917), and Retrogression and other Poems (1917).
Also in 1917 Watson published The Man who Saw and other Poems Arising out of the War. The title poem, a tribute to the wartime prime minister, David Lloyd George, earned Watson a knighthood, bestowed on 4 June 1917. His final poetic efforts were the long poem The Superhuman Antagonists (1919), which espoused a guarded meliorism, two short volumes of verse (1919) in support of the Irish rising: Ireland Unfreed and Ireland Arisen, and Poems Brief and New (1925).
When Sir William Watson died on 12 August 1935 in a nursing home, Limes Convalescent Home, at Ditchling Common, Sussex, he was almost totally forgotten and many were surprised that he had survived so long into the century. He was buried on 16 August in the family tomb in Childwall churchyard, Childwall Abbey, Liverpool.
JAMES G. NELSON
Sources J. G. Nelson, Sir William Watson (1966) · W. E. Swayze, ‘The early career of Sir William Watson, 1858–1905', PhD Diss., Yale U., 1951 · J. M. Wilson, I was an English poet: a biography of Sir William Watson (1981) · M. Watson, ‘England are you proud', Yale U., Watson Collection [biography of W. Watson]
Archives Bodl. Oxf., corresp. and papers incl. literary MSS · Hunt. L., letters and literary MSS · Yale U., Beinecke L., papers | BL, corresp. with William Archer, Add. MS 54297 · BL, corresp. with Sir Sydney Cockerell, Add. MS 52758 · BL, letters to G. L. Craik, Add. MS 61895 · BL, letters to Macmillans, Add. MS 61895 · BL, corresp. of him and his executors with the Society of Authors, Add. MS 56841 · BLPES, letters to A. G. Gardiner · Bodl. Oxf., letters to A. C. Benson · Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with John Lane · Bodl. Oxf., Walpole ‘Nineties' Collection · CAC Cam., corresp. with Lord Fisher · CUL, letters to E. H. Blakeney · L. Cong., Watson material · NL Scot., letters to Sir Herbert Grierson · Ransom HRC, corresp. with John Lane · TCD, corresp. with Edward Dowden · U. Leeds, corresp. with Sir Edmund Gosse · U. Leeds, Brotherton L., collection · U. Lpool L., letters to W. B. Nichols · U. Newcastle, Robinson L., letters to Frederic Whyte · U. Reading, letters to Charles Elkin Mathews
Likenesses R. G. Eves, oils, 1929?, NPG · S. W. Andrews, drawing (aged thirty-five), Yale U. · M. Beerbohm, caricature, drawing, Princeton University Library, New Jersey · Elliott & Fry, cabinet photograph, NPG · London Stereoscopic Co., cabinet photograph, NPG · J. Russell & Sons, photograph, NPG · photograph (aged fifty), Yale U.
© Oxford University Press 2004–14 All rights reserved
James G. Nelson, ‘Watson, Sir (John) William (1858–1935)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36774, accessed 1 July 2014]
Sir (John) William Watson (1858–1935): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36774
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