Complete Poetical Works Of Francis Thompson

'I fled Him, down the nights and down the days' – the poet who wrote that line, collected whole: the poems for children, the love poems, and the great religious odes.

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) was born in Preston, trained without enthusiasm for medicine at Owens College in Manchester, and drifted to London, where he sold matches and slept by the river while dependent on laudanum. The editor Wilfrid Meynell, who had printed one of his poems in the magazine Merry England, sought him out and, with his wife Alice, took him in. Poems followed in 1893, Sister Songs in 1895, and New Poems in 1897, and with them a standing as the outstanding English Catholic poet of his generation.

Complete Poetical Works of Francis Thompson brings those three collections together with his uncollected work, first gathered in this form in 1913 and reprinted here from the Modern Library text. 'The Hound of Heaven' is the piece everyone knows, but the range is wider than its reputation suggests: nursery tenderness, odes on the sun and the seasons, translations from Hugo, and a handful of poems written in the last years of a short and difficult life. This edition adds a chapter on Thompson from Benjamin Franklin Fisher's Francis Thompson, Essays of 1917, an early appraisal to set beside the poems themselves.