William Henry Davies

William Henry Davies , 1871-1940, British poet, b. Wales. Leaving school at a young age, Davies lived for a number of years as a peddler and a beggar in the United States and England. His first attempt at poetry, The Soul's Destroyer (1905), printed at his own expense, won the favorable attention of G. B. Shaw . Thereafter Davies's success was assured. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) describes his vagabond life. Davies was a prolific poet; his favorite themes were nature and the hardships of the poor.

Bibliography: See his poems (ed. by O. Sitwell, 1942).

Davies, W. H. ( William Henry Davies) (1871–1940), poet, spent several years wandering in America; on his second visit he lost a leg in an accident, an experience recounted in a few laconic paragraphs in his The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908); it had a preface by G. B. Shaw, who did much to encourage the young poet and interested himself in Davies's first volume, The Soul's Destroyer and Other Poems (1905). This was followed by several other volumes. His best-known poems record his sharp and intense response to the natural world. In 1923 he married a girl much younger than himself, and he tells the story of his extraordinary courtship in Young Emma, posthumously published in 1980. His Complete Poems, with an introduction by O. Sitwell, appeared in 1963.