Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke
Frederic William Henry Myers (18431901)Critical Introduction by John Drinkwater
[Born at Keswick on February 6, 1843, his father being a Keswick clergyman and his mother a Marshall of Hallsteads. He had a distinguished career at Cheltenham and at Cambridge, where he won no less than six University prizes and was second in the first class both of the Classical and the Moral Sciences Tripos; won a reputation as a critic; and became a leader of the psychical research movement. He died in Rome on January 17, 1901. His Saint Paul (1867), an unsuccessful prize poem, was followed by Poems (1870) and The Renewal of Youth (1882).]
A great deal of the work of Frederic Myers, a poet of many gifts, suffers from this failure, though his fine classical scholarship ought to have saved him. His most famous and still popular poem, Saint Paul, has metrical interest, though the form in itself is apt to combine with Myers’s mental method to throw an emotional haze over the work. Here and there are figures of comparatively sharp definition, as in the passage here given, though a characteristic vagueness in the poem makes it difficult for us to do more than feel that here is a fine spiritual fervour, but that our perception of it is incomplete because of the lack of precision in the poet’s statement. Many of Myers’s other poems are touched by the same defect, but his real singing quality carries him happily through shorter pieces—such as that general favourite, Simmenthal—often enough to give him permanently something at least of the fame that was so widely his in his own day. With secondary poetic qualities he was well equipped; he had an earnest curiosity about life, wide and liberal knowledge, a sensitive and individual rhythmical gift, considerable grace of style, and spiritual dignity; and when he was visited by the clearer poetic mood, and was not misled by his too volatile imagination, these fine natural gifts were ready to the service of his inspiration, and he wrote shapely verse, infused at its best with a generous temper and real tenderness, and now and again moving with great delicacy, as in the subtle arrangement of the last line of—