It is a little strange to think of Ralph Hodgson’s ‘Poems’, collected and published in 1917, being contemporaneous with Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (begun 1910, published in Poetry in 1915), but there we are.

He was born in Yorkshire in 1871, the son of a coal miner or coal merchant. A champion boxer and billiard player, an actor in New York, an artist in London, he wrote most of his poems between 1907 and 1917. During the First World War he was in the Royal Navy, and then the British Army. In the 1930s he taught in university in Japan and was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun for his work in translating classical Japanese poetry into English. He then moved to Minerva, Ohio, living there until his death in 1962.

Hodgson was of the Georgian school – traditional, pastoral, occasionally longwinded, but often charming and memorable. Poems that I know and love in this collection include:

‘Time, You Old Gipsy Man’, with its simple, wistful philosophy:
“Time, you old gipsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?
(…)
Last week in Babylon,
Last night in Rome,
Morning, and in the crush
Under Paul’s dome;”

‘Eve’, with its lyrical portrayal of her seduction by Satan:
“Eve, with her basket, was
Deep in the bells and grass,
Wading in bells and grass
Up to her knees,”

‘Stupidity Street’, with the animal-lover and natural ecologist’s outrage:
“I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.

I saw in vision
The worm in the wheat,
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.”

‘The Birdcatcher’:
“I lurk among the thickets of
The Heart where they are bred,
And catch the twittering beauties as
They fly into my Head.”

It’s not Eliot. But at his best, Hodgson is truly charming.