Alfred Noyes

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) was an English poet best known for “The Highwayman,” the moonlit ballad of a robber and the landlord’s daughter Bess that he wrote at the age of 24 and published in 1906. Before the First World War he was one of the most widely read poets in the English-speaking world, loved for musical, fast-moving verse about the sea, English history and old legends. He later taught at Princeton, became a Roman Catholic, and died on the Isle of Wight in 1958.

Noyes is the rare poet whose poem is more famous than his name. He wrote for the ear, in the line of Tennyson and Kipling, at exactly the moment modernism taught critics to distrust any poem that was easy to love. The critics won the argument about his reputation. The schoolchildren who still learn “The Highwayman” by heart won the argument about his poem.

ON THIS PAGE
Why He Matters · Timeline · Life and Career · Poetry and Style · Famous Poems and Books · Legacy · FAQ
Related Poets · Sources

Why Alfred Noyes Matters

Noyes shows what poetry sounded like to ordinary readers in the years before “The Waste Land.” His first book was praised by W. B. Yeats and George Meredith, his epic Drake was serialised to a mass audience, and by his early thirties he was lecturing to packed halls in the United States. He was, for a decade, what a popular poet looked like: rhythmic, patriotic, romantic and proud of it.

He matters for a second reason too. Noyes chose to fight modernism in public, calling Joyce’s Ulysses “the foulest book that has ever found its way into print,” and the new critics answered by writing him out of serious literary history. His career is the clearest case of a poet on the losing side of that argument, and “The Highwayman” is the clearest proof that losing the argument did not mean losing the readers.

Alfred Noyes Timeline

1880

Alfred Noyes is born on 16 September in Wolverhampton, England, the son of Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes.

c. 1884

The family moves to Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast.

1898

Enters Exeter College, Oxford.

1902

Publishes his first collection, The Loom of Years.

1903

Leaves Oxford without a degree after missing his final exams to meet his publisher.

1904

“The Barrel-Organ” appears in Poems.

1906

“The Highwayman” is published in Blackwood’s Magazine in August. The epic Drake begins to appear.

1907

Marries Garnett Daniels and publishes Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems. Makes his first visit to the United States.

1913

Publishes Tales of the Mermaid Tavern and receives an honorary doctorate from Yale.

1914

Joins Princeton University as a visiting professor of modern English literature.

1916

Begins propaganda work for the Foreign Office with John Buchan.

1918

Appointed CBE.

1922

Publishes Watchers of the Sky, the first volume of The Torch-Bearers.

1923

Resigns from Princeton.

1926

Garnett Noyes dies at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France.

1927

Marries Mary Angela Mayne and is received into the Roman Catholic Church.

1929

Settles at Lisle Combe, on the Undercliff near Ventnor, Isle of Wight.

1930

The Last Voyage completes The Torch-Bearers trilogy.

1934

Publishes The Unknown God, the account of his path to faith.

1936

His biography Voltaire is referred to the Vatican’s Holy Office.

1940

Moves to North America to lecture on Britain’s cause in the Second World War.

1941

Gives the Josiah Wood Lectures at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada.

1949

Returns to England, now losing his sight.

1953

Publishes his autobiography, Two Worlds for Memory.

1957

Publishes The Accusing Ghost, or Justice for Casement.

1958

Dies of polio on the Isle of Wight on 25 June, aged 77.

Life and Career

Noyes lived through the whole arc of a literary reputation: early fame, a long middle career of big ambitions, and a slow eclipse he spent the last thirty years resisting. The sections below follow that arc in order.

Early Life in Wales (1880–1898)

Alfred Noyes was born in Wolverhampton, in the English Midlands, on 16 September 1880. When he was about four the family moved to Aberystwyth, where his father, a teacher, grounded him in Latin and Greek. The Welsh coast gave him the subject he returned to all his life. The sea, ships and sailors fill his early books, and the rolling rhythm of his best-known poems owes something to a boyhood spent within sound of the waves.

Oxford and a First Book (1898–1903)

In 1898 Noyes went up to Exeter College, Oxford, where he was better known as an oarsman than as a scholar. His first collection, The Loom of Years, appeared in 1902 while he was still a student. The next year he missed his final examinations to see his publisher about a new book, and he left Oxford without a degree. It was a telling choice: from the start, Noyes meant to live by his pen.

Fame Before Thirty (1904–1913)

Success came quickly. “The Barrel-Organ,” with its refrain “Go down to Kew in lilac-time,” appeared in his 1904 collection Poems and became a favourite for recitation. At 24, while lodging at Bagshot Heath in Surrey, a district once haunted by highwaymen, he wrote “The Highwayman” in about two days. Blackwood’s Magazine printed it in August 1906, and it was collected the next year in Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems.

The same years produced Drake (1906–1908), a book-length epic in blank verse about Sir Francis Drake, and Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (1913), verse stories set among the Elizabethan poets and playwrights who drank at the Mermaid in London. In 1907 he married Garnett Daniels, the youngest daughter of a United States Army colonel and Civil War veteran, and made his first trip to America, where his lecture tours soon drew large crowds.

Princeton and the First World War (1914–1923)

In February 1914 Princeton University invited Noyes to lecture on modern English literature as a visiting professor. The arrangement lasted nine years, with Noyes dividing his time between England and the United States; his students included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. Poor eyesight kept him out of the army when war came, and from 1916 he worked for the Foreign Office on propaganda alongside the novelist John Buchan. He was appointed CBE in 1918 and resigned from Princeton in 1923.

Grief, Faith and The Torch-Bearers (1922–1934)

The 1920s were Noyes’s most ambitious decade. The Torch-Bearers, a verse epic in three volumes (1922, 1925 and 1930), told the history of science through the lives of its discoverers, beginning with the astronomers of Watchers of the Sky. In 1926 Garnett died in France. The following year he married Mary Angela Mayne, a war widow, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. In 1929 the couple settled at Lisle Combe, a house on the Undercliff near Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, where they raised three children, Hugh, Veronica and Margaret. Noyes explained his journey from agnosticism to faith in The Unknown God (1934).

Controversies: Ulysses, Voltaire and Casement

Noyes was never afraid of a fight. In a 1922 newspaper article he condemned Ulysses as “the foulest book that has ever found its way into print,” and he remained a loud opponent of modernist writing for the rest of his life. His sympathetic biography Voltaire (1936) drew fire from the other side: it was reported to the Vatican’s Holy Office, which asked for corrections. Noyes argued that he had been misread, and the dispute was settled by 1939.

The longest quarrel concerned Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist hanged for treason in 1916. While at the Foreign Office, Noyes had been shown the so-called Black Diaries used to discredit Casement and had accepted them as genuine. In 1937 W. B. Yeats named him in the poem “Roger Casement.” Noyes replied that he might have been misled, and Yeats removed his name from later versions. Noyes spent years on the case and in 1957 published The Accusing Ghost, or Justice for Casement, arguing that the diaries were forged. A forensic study in 2002 concluded that they were authentic.

War Years in North America (1940–1949)

In 1940 Noyes crossed the Atlantic again to lecture on Britain’s position in the Second World War. At Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, he gave the Josiah Wood Lectures in 1941, published as The Edge of the Abyss, a warning that modern culture was losing its moral bearings. He stayed in North America until 1949.

Blindness and Last Years (1949–1958)

Back at Lisle Combe, Noyes was going blind, and from then on he dictated everything he wrote. The late books include the children’s collection Daddy Fell into the Pond and Other Poems (1952) and his autobiography, Two Worlds for Memory (1953). His last poem, “Ballade of the Breaking Shell,” was written in May 1958. A month later, on 25 June 1958, he died of polio at the age of 77. He is buried in the Catholic cemetery near St Saviour’s Church at Totland, on the Isle of Wight.

Poetry and Style

Noyes wrote poems to be heard. His signature is the long, galloping line and the refrain that comes back with a small change each time: “Riding, riding, riding” in “The Highwayman,” the lilac-time chorus of “The Barrel-Organ.” He reached for sound first and let the meaning ride on it, which is why his poems work so well read aloud and so badly skimmed on a page.

His subjects are storytelling subjects: the sea, Elizabethan England, highwaymen and ghosts, and later the heroes of science. He trusted narrative at a time when poets were abandoning it, and he wrote in rhyme and regular metre all his life. At his best this gives his ballads the drive of a folk song. At his weakest it slides into sentiment and patriotic uplift, which is the part of his work the modernist critics found easiest to mock.

The fairest reading is that Noyes was a late Victorian born twenty years too late. He is closer to Tennyson’s ballads and Kipling’s sea songs than to anything written by his Princeton students. That made him old-fashioned by 1920, but it also made him the last major poet to write story poems that ordinary readers memorised for pleasure.

Famous Poems and Books

Noyes published more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, criticism and memoir. These are the works most often read and taught today.

• The Highwayman (1906): A narrative ballad in which Bess, the landlord’s daughter, sacrifices herself to warn her highwayman lover of an ambush. His best-known poem by far.
• The Barrel-Organ (1904): A street organ in London sets passers-by dreaming of spring, with the refrain “Go down to Kew in lilac-time.”
• Drake (1906–1908): A book-length epic in blank verse about Sir Francis Drake and the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
• Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems (1907): The collection that first gathered “The Highwayman,” named for its comic ballad of sailors’ tall tales.
• The Admiral’s Ghost: A ballad built on the legend that Drake’s spirit returns whenever England needs him.
• Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (1913): Verse stories set among Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson and the other Elizabethan writers at their London tavern.
• The Torch-Bearers (1922–1930): A three-volume epic on the history of science, from the astronomers of Watchers of the Sky onward.
• Daddy Fell into the Pond and Other Poems (1952): Light verse for children, dictated after he lost his sight. The title poem remains a classroom favourite.

Reputation and Legacy

Noyes’s standing among critics fell sharply in the 1920s. Edgell Rickword and F. R. Leavis, two of the most influential critics of the new generation, treated him as the model of everything modern poetry had outgrown, and Leavis dismissed his poetry as “intrinsically uninteresting.” Noyes’s attacks on Joyce, Eliot and their admirers only hardened the verdict, and for most of the twentieth century he was left out of university anthologies.

Readers kept a different record. “The Highwayman” came 15th in a 1995 BBC poll of Britain’s favourite poems, and it has been set to music by Phil Ochs and Loreena McKennitt. Charles Keeping’s illustrated edition won the 1981 Kate Greenaway Medal. More than a century after it was written, it is still one of the poems British and North American schoolchildren are most likely to meet first, which gives Noyes a kind of survival many of his more admired contemporaries never had.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions readers most often ask about Alfred Noyes.

When and where was Alfred Noyes born?

Alfred Noyes was born on 16 September 1880 in Wolverhampton, England. When he was about four, his family moved to Aberystwyth in Wales, where he grew up beside the sea.

How did Alfred Noyes die?

Alfred Noyes died of polio on 25 June 1958, at the age of 77, on the Isle of Wight. He had been almost blind for several years and is buried in the Catholic cemetery at Totland.

How old was Alfred Noyes when he wrote The Highwayman?

He was 24. Noyes wrote “The Highwayman” in about two days while lodging at Bagshot Heath in Surrey, and it was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in August 1906.

What inspired Alfred Noyes to write The Highwayman?

The landscape of Bagshot Heath in Surrey inspired it. Noyes was staying in the area, once notorious for highwaymen, and later recalled that the sound of the wind in the pines gave him the poem’s first line.

What college did Alfred Noyes attend?

He attended Exeter College, Oxford, from 1898. He rowed for the college but left in 1903 without a degree, having missed his final exams to meet his publisher.

Related Poets

• Alfred Tennyson: The Victorian master of the ballad and the refrain, and the poet Noyes most resembles.
• Rudyard Kipling: A fellow writer of rhythmic, popular verse about the sea, soldiers and empire.
• Henry Newbolt: His “Drake’s Drum” draws on the same Drake legend as Noyes’s “The Admiral’s Ghost.”
• John Masefield: A near contemporary whose sea ballads won the popular audience Noyes also courted.
• Walter de la Mare: Another story-telling poet of the same years, best known for the ghostly “The Listeners.”
• G. K. Chesterton: A Catholic convert, ballad writer and fierce critic of modern fashions, much like Noyes.

Sources

• Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes, Volume 1, Project Gutenberg
• Noyes, Alfred, New Catholic Encyclopedia, via Encyclopedia.com
• Alfred Noyes, Poet, Isle of Wight County History Society
• Alfred Noyes, Wikipedia