A short life of the author
W. H. Davies is one of the strangest success stories in the history of English poetry — a man who spent his twenties and early thirties as a tramp, vagabond, and itinerant labourer in England and North America, who lost his right foot below the knee while jumping a freight train in Canada, who subsequently taught himself to write poetry in doss-houses and workhouses, and who then, through a combination of raw talent and sheer persistence, became one of the most popular and critically acclaimed poets of the Georgian era, praised by Shaw, Yeats, Edward Thomas, and Ezra Pound. His autobiography was a minor classic; his poem “Leisure” became one of the most quoted poems in the English language; and his life remained, even after his literary success, a rebuke to the assumption that poetry requires education, comfort, or social respectability.
Newport
William Henry Davies was born in 1871 in Newport, Monmouthshire (now Gwent), in a working-class household. His father died when he was a small child, and he was raised by his grandparents. He was apprenticed to a picture-frame maker but showed no interest in settled employment. At the age of twenty-two, inspired by the example of American hobos he had read about, he sailed to New York and began the life of a tramp — travelling by freight train across the United States and Canada, picking fruit, begging, sleeping in fields and flophouses, and experiencing the vast, violent, freewheeling world of late nineteenth-century American itinerant labour.
In 1899, attempting to jump a freight train near Renfrew, Ontario, his right foot was crushed and had to be amputated below the knee. The injury ended his tramping career and forced him back to England, where he lived in doss-houses in London while teaching himself to write poetry.
The Super-Tramp
The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) told the story of Davies’s tramping years with a matter-of-fact directness that was its principal literary virtue. The book did not romanticise the life of the road or sentimentalise its hardships — it simply described what Davies had seen and done with a clarity and an economy that were wholly his own. George Bernard Shaw wrote an admiring preface, and the book was widely reviewed and praised.
The success of the autobiography brought Davies to the attention of the Georgian literary establishment. Edward Thomas became a close friend and champion. W. B. Yeats included Davies in his anthology of modern verse. Within a few years, the former tramp was a recognised figure in London literary society, receiving a Civil List pension and publishing new volumes of poetry at regular intervals.
The Poetry
Davies published over twenty collections of poetry during his lifetime — a prodigious output that inevitably varied in quality but that at its best displayed a combination of simplicity, sensory vividness, and emotional directness that set it apart from both the ornate diction of the late Victorians and the intellectual complexity of the modernists.
His most famous poem, “Leisure” (1911), opened with lines that became proverbial: “What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare.” The poem’s argument — that the frantic pace of modern life prevents us from appreciating the beauty of the natural world — was simple, but its rhythmic perfection and its gift for the memorable phrase gave it a staying power that more ambitious poems have not achieved.
Davies’s best poems were about nature — birds, trees, rain, moonlight, the turning of the seasons — observed with the precision of a man who had spent years sleeping outdoors. They were also about poverty, loneliness, and the experience of being an outsider in a society that measured human worth by economic productivity. Poems like “The Kingfisher,” “The Rain,” and “A Great Time” combined lyrical beauty with a working-class perspective that was unusual in Georgian poetry.
Young Emma
Young Emma was Davies’s most personal book — an autobiographical account of his courtship of and marriage to a young woman he had met on the streets. Written in the late 1920s, the book was so frank about his sexual life and about his wife’s background that it was suppressed during Davies’s lifetime and not published until 1980. It is now recognised as one of the most psychologically honest autobiographical documents of the period.
Collecting Davies
The Soul’s Destroyer and Other Poems (privately printed, 1905) is the primary collecting target — Davies’s first book of poems, printed at his own expense in a tiny edition. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (A. C. Fifield, 1908) is widely collected, particularly copies with Shaw’s preface. The many subsequent poetry collections are available to patient collectors but first editions in fine condition are increasingly scarce.