John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater (1 June 1882 – 25 March 1937) was an English poet, dramatist, and critic who achieved enormous success with his historical play Abraham Lincoln (1918) — one of the most popular English-language dramas of the early twentieth century — but whose wider literary reputation faded quickly as the Georgian poetry movement to which he belonged was eclipsed by modernism. He is a representative figure of a literary generation that was confident, accomplished, and almost entirely forgotten.

Life

Drinkwater was born in Leytonstone, Essex, the son of a schoolteacher who was also an actor. He left school at fifteen and worked as an insurance clerk in Nottingham and later Birmingham, educating himself through voracious reading. In 1907, he helped found the Pilgrim Players, an amateur theatrical company that became the Birmingham Repertory Theatre — one of the most important regional theatres in England — under the direction of Barry Jackson. Drinkwater served as the theatre’s manager and resident dramatist.

He was associated with the Georgian poets — the group around Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry anthologies (1912–1922) that included Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, and W. H. Davies. Drinkwater’s poetry is Georgian in its virtues and its limitations: skilled, accessible, nature-loving, formally conservative, and ultimately minor.

Abraham Lincoln (1918)

Drinkwater’s masterwork is a chronicle play in six scenes tracing Lincoln’s presidency from election through assassination. It was first performed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in October 1918 — weeks before the Armistice — and transferred to the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, in 1919, where it ran for over a year. It opened on Broadway in December 1919 and was a sensation, running for 193 performances.

The play’s success was partly a matter of timing: audiences in 1918–1919, exhausted by war, responded to Lincoln as a symbol of principled leadership and democratic idealism. But the play is also genuinely effective as drama — Drinkwater presents Lincoln as a man of moral clarity surrounded by advisers who counsel compromise, and the structure builds steadily from political debate to tragic inevitability.

Drinkwater followed Abraham Lincoln with Oliver Cromwell (1921) and Robert E. Lee (1923), attempting to establish a cycle of historical chronicle plays. Neither matched the success of Lincoln.

Poetry

Drinkwater published over a dozen collections of verse, beginning with Poems (1903). His poetry is craftsmanlike and pleasant — nature poems, love poems, meditations on rural England — but lacks the intensity or originality that would survive the modernist revolution. Poems like “Moonlit Apples” and “A Prayer” were widely anthologised in their day and have quietly disappeared from anthologies since.

Preludes 1921–1922 (1922) is perhaps his strongest collection, showing a somewhat darker sensibility influenced by the war.

Criticism and Prose

Drinkwater wrote literary biographies of William Morris (1912) and Swinburne (1913) that were popular introductions in their time. His two-volume autobiography, Inheritance (1931) and Discovery (1932), provides a valuable portrait of Birmingham literary and theatrical life in the early twentieth century.

Critical Standing

Drinkwater is now almost entirely forgotten — a fate he shares with most of the Georgian poets. Abraham Lincoln is occasionally revived by amateur companies but has not entered the permanent repertory. His poetry, once widely read, is absent from modern anthologies. He represents a type of literary career that was once common and is now incomprehensible to readers raised on modernism: the accomplished, respected, prolific man of letters whose work was always competent and never essential.

Collecting Drinkwater

Abraham Lincoln (1918, Sidgwick & Jackson) in first edition brings £30–£80. His poetry collections, published in small editions by Samurai Press and Sidgwick & Jackson, bring £10–£40. Complete collections are achievable and inexpensive.