Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noël
Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noël (
August 27,
1834 -
May 26,
1894),
English poet, was the son of Noël, Lord Barham, afterwards earl of Gainsborough.
He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.A. in 1858. He then spent two years travelling in the East. He married in 1863 Alice de Bro, daughter of the director of the Ottoman Bank in Beirut. The third child of this marriage, Eric, who died at the age of five, is commemorated in Roden Noël's best-known book of verse, A Little Child's Monument (1881).
His other volumes are:
- Behind the Veil, and other Poems (1863), not included in his collected works
- Beatrice, and other Poems (1868)
- The Red Flag (1872)
- Livingstone in Africa (1874)
- Songs of the Heights and Deeps (1885)
- A Modern Faust, and other Poems (1888)
- Poor People's Christmas (1890)
- My Sea, and other Poems (1896).
Roden Noël's versification was unequal and sometimes harsh, but he has a genuine feeling for nature, and the work is permeated by philosophic thought. The latter part of his life was spent at
Brighton, but he died at
Mainz. His other works include a drama in verse,
The House of Ravensburg (1877), a
Life of Byron (1890, Great Writers series), a selection of
Thomas Otway's plays (1888) for the Mermaid series, and critical papers on literature and
philosophy.
His Collected Poems were edited (1902) by his sister, Victoria Buxton, with a notice by John Addington Symonds, which had originally appeared in the Academy (January 19, 1899) as a review of The Modern Faust. The selection (1892) in the series of Canterbury Poets has an introduction by Robert Buchanan.
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