W. H. Davies

William Henry Davies, a Welsh poet, was born in 1871 and died in 1940. Poet and writer William Henry Davies was born in Newport, Wales. He attended school until age 14 and then apprenticed with a picture framer while attending night school. At age 22, with a small inheritance, he paid for his passage to New York and spent the next six years exploring the United States and Canada, earning enough to live through casual labour. After an injury in 1899 resulted in amputation of his right leg below the knee, Davies returned to Wales and then settled in London, where he wrote his poetry.

Davies’s poems are realistic and deal in hardship, the natural world and city life. He published twenty collections of poetry, as well as prose writings.

He is oftencategorised as one of the group of Georgian poets who wrote early in the twentieth century when George V was King. The Georgians often wrote about nature, but in an modern idiom with more accessible direct English, seeking to move away from the overblown language of some of the late Victorian and Edwardian poets.