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Alfred Austin (30 May 1835 – 2 June 1913) was an English poet who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896, after an interval following the death of Tennyson, when the other candidates had either caused controversy or refused the honour. It was claimed that he was being rewarded for his support for the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury in the General Election of 1895. Austin's poems are little remembered today, his most popular work being prose idylls celebrating nature. Wilfred Scawen Blunt wrote of him, "He is an acute and ready reasoner, and is well read in theology and science. It is strange his poetry should be such poor stuff, and stranger still that he should imagine it immortal."
He unsuccessfully stood as a Conservative Party candidate for Taunton in 1865, finishing in fourth place, and at Dewsbury in 1880.Under Ashford, Kent.
Politically conservative, between 1866 and 1896 Austin edited National Review and wrote leading articles for The Standard. He was Foreign Affairs Correspondent with the Standard and served as a special correspondent to the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican in 1870; at the Headquarters of the King of Prussia during the Franco-Prussian War, 1870; at the Congress of Berlin, 1878 where he was granted an audience by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. An ardent imperialist and follower of Disraeli he became, in 1883, joint editor of the National Review with W. J. Courthope and was sole editor from 1887 until 1896.
On Tennyson's death in 1892 it was felt that none of the then living poets, except Algernon Charles Swinburne or William Morris, who were outside consideration on other grounds, was of sufficient distinction to succeed to the laurel crown, and for several years no new poet-laureate was nominated. In the interval the claims of one writer and another were assessed,By, for example, the theatre critic Joseph Knight and others in The Idler: see but eventually, in 1896, Austin was appointed to the post after Morris had declined it. As a poet Austin never ranked highly in the opinions of his peers and was often derided as being a "Banjo Byron".
The critic Edmund Broadus wrote that the choice of Austin for poet-laureate had much to do with Austin's friendship with Lord Salisbury, his position as an editor and leader writer, and his willingness to use his poetry to support the government.Edmund Kemper Broadus, The Laureateship, A Study Of The Office Of Poet Laureate In England With Some Account Of The Poets, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921, p. 203. For example, shortly before his appointment was announced, Austin published a sonnet entitled "A Vindication of England", written in response to a series of sonnets by William Watson, published in the Westminster Gazette, that had accused Salisbury's government of betraying Armenia and abandoning its people to Turkish massacres.William Watson, The Purple East, A Series Of Sonnets On England's Desertion of Armenia, London, 1896, pp. 7-8.
Sir Owen Seaman (1861–1936) gave added currency to the supposed connection with Lord Salisbury in his poem, "To Mr Alfred Austin", In Cap and Bells, London & New York, 1900, 9:
At length a callous Tory chief arose,
Master of caustic jest and cynic gibe,
Looked round the Carlton Club and lightly chose
Its leading scribe.
Austin served as Deputy-Lieutenant for Herefordshire. Austin died of unknown causes at Swinford Old Manor,Photo at Hothfield, near Ashford, Kent, England, where he had been ill for some time.
A contemporary critic, Walter Whyte, praised the "purity" of Austin's style: "He writes sound unaffected English; his meaning is always transparent. He has not sought to emulate Tennyson's exquisite elaboration of diction; his lines are seldom jewelled by 'curious felicities.' But they are always graceful, and sometimes admirably vigorous and hearty.... One of the charms of his poetry lies in the freshness and vividness of his descriptions of Nature. He has dealt powerfully with the grandeurs of Alpine scenery, but his happiest pictures are of English fields and woods."Walter Whyte, "Alfred Austin", in Alfred H. Miles (ed.), The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, Vol. 6: William Morris to Robert Buchanan (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1891), pp. 148–149
The critic George Saintsbury, while endorsing the general view that "Alfred Austin hardly deserved to be made poet laureate," found him "a really vigorous and accomplished writer of prose, and a tolerable master of unambitious form in verse." Austin, he wrote, "could keep up poems of some length like Prince Lucifer and The Human Tragedy," and approach a modicum of "vigour and passion in lyric." The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1907–1921), Vol. XIII: English. The Victorian Age, Part 1, (ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller), Ch. VI. Lesser Poets of the Middle and Later Nineteenth Century (by George Saintsbury), §47. Alfred Austin
As poet-laureate, his topical verses did not escape negative criticism; a hasty poem written in praise of the Jameson Raid in 1896 being a notable instance. A drama by him, Flodden Field, was performed at His Majesty's theatre in 1903, with incidental music by Percy Pitt. A number of his poems were set to music by Frances Allitsen, and Alexander Mackenzie's contribution to Choral Songs in Honour of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (1899) was a setting of Austin's occasional poem "With wisdom, goodness, grace".
Poetry
Drama
Other
He was as "Sir Austed Alfrin" by L. Frank Baum in his 1906 novel John Dough and the Cherub.
Van Morrison's song "Haunts of Ancient Peace", the first track on his 1980 album Common One, took its title from Austin's 1902 book of the same name.Peter Mills, (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 338.
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| Now upon English soil I soon shall stand, Homeward from climes that fancy deems more fair; And well I know that there will greet me there No soft foam fawning upon smiling strand, No scent of orange-groves, no zephyrs bland; But Amazonian March, with breast half bare And sleety arrows whistling through the air, Will be my welcome from that burly land. Yet he who boasts his birth-place yonder lies Owns in his heart a mood akin to scorn For sensuous slopes that bask 'neath Southern skies, Teeming with wine and prodigal of corn, And, gazing through the mist with misty eyes, Blesses the brave bleak land where he was born. | |
| Alfred Austin, from Songs of England |
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