Norman Gale

For the Wales international rugby union player, see Norman Gale (rugby union).

Norman Rowland Gale (4 March 1862 – 7 October 1942) was a poet, novelist and reviewer, who published many books over a period of nearly fifty years.[1]

Gale was born in Kew, Surrey. He entered Exeter College, Oxford in 1880 and graduated in 1884.[2] He was a teacher for some years, but in 1892 he began writing full-time.[3] His poems "Betrothed" and "The Call" appeared in The Yellow Book.[4][5] His best-known poem is probably "The Country Faith",[6] which is in The Oxford Book of English Verse. In the United States, Louis Untermeyer included it in his anthology Modern British Poetry, and, with a change of title to "Life in the Country", it opened the second reader in Cora Wilson Stewart's series, Country Life Readers.[7]

For the last two years of his life Gale lived in Headley Down, Hampshire, where he died at the age of eighty.[8]

  1. ^ "Norman Rowland Gale". allpoetry.com. All Poetry. Retrieved 16 January 2015.
  2. ^ Michael Seeney, A Six Foot Three Nightingale: Norman Gale, 1862–1942: A Biographical Essay and Check-List (Oxford: Rivendale Press, 1998), p. 3
  3. ^ Louis Untermeyer (ed.), Modern British Poetry: A Critical Introduction, 3rd revised edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930), p. 278
  4. ^ "Betrothed", The Yellow Book, Volume 2 (July 1894), p. 227
  5. ^ "The Call", The Yellow Book, Volume 5 (April 1895), pp. 280–282
  6. ^ "The Country Faith" at bartleby.com
  7. ^ Jane Greer, "Literacy, Learning and Letters: Cora Wilson Stewart's Moonlight Schools, 1911–1930", Midwest Modern Language Association (2000)
  8. ^ Hampshire Telegraph and Post (23 October 1942), p. 8