Author Gibson Wilfrid Wilson
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (October 2, 1878 - May 26, 1962), was a British poet, associated with World War I but also the author of much later work. Gibson was born in Hexham, Northumberland and left the north for London in 1912 after his father died. He had been publishing poems in magazines since 1897, and the collections Stonefolds, On The Threshold, were published by the Samurai Press in 1907, and followed by The Web of Life in 1908.[1] Despite his residence in London and later on in Gloucestershire, many of Gibson's poems both then and later, have Northumberland settings: 'Hexham's Market Cross'; 'Hareshaw'; and 'The Kielder Stone'. Others deal with poverty and passion amid wild Northumbrian landscapes. Still others are devoted to fishermen, industrial workers and miners, often alluding to local ballads and the rich folk-song heritage of the North East. It was in London that he met both Edward Marsh and Rupert Brooke, becoming a close friend and later Brooke's literary executor (with L
...ascelles Abercrombie and Walter de la Mare).[2] This was at the period when the first Georgian Poetry anthology was being hatched. Gibson was one of the insiders.[3] During the early part of his writing life, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson wrote poems that featured the "macabre." One such poem is Flannan Isle, based on a real life mystery. Gibson was one of the founders of the so-called ”Dymock Poets”, a community of writers who settled briefly, before the outbreak of the Great War, in the village of Dymock, in north Gloucestershire.[4] He never saw active service during his brief time as an army private, but his poetry belies his lack of experience, Breakfast written in the book "Up To The Line Of Death - The War Poets 1914-1918" is a prime example of ironic war verse written during the very early stages of the conflict. Another example of his war-time poetry is Back. In this poem the speaker wonders how to respond to the questions about what the speaker did in the war. The speaker does not believe that it was his true self who went across, however he knows that physically it was him. On November 11th, 1985, Gibson was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner[5]. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."[6] His reputation was eclipsed somewhat by the Ezra Pound-T. S. Eliot school of Modernist poetry[7][8]; his work remained popular.
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