POEMS COMPOSED IN ADVERSITY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 26 March 1930, Page 8

POEMS COMPOSED IN ADVERSITY

The first part of the finest epic poem in the Spanish language, Ei'cillae's "Araucania." was written by camp fires, after the day's fighting or marching, in what is now" Chile. The poem was written on any bit of leather or paper the poet could obtain on' the spur of the moment in his wild surroundings. Many of Walt Whitmans finest poems Were composed during the American Civil War in field hospitals where he was working. "The Farmer's Boy" was published, with illustrations by Berwick, in 1800, and 26,000 copies were sold in three years. Its author, Robert Bloomfiekl, produced his poem while employed as a shoemaker in an attic where half-a-dozen other men also worked. He. was too busily occupied to find occasion to write the. lines he had composed, and often had to (tarry a hundred lines in mind until evening. Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, wrote a poem in gaol. Ho called it "The Purgatory of Suicide." Oscar Wilde, while incarcerated there, wrote "The Ballad of Reading Jail" ; and Charles D'Orleans, captured at Agincourt, wrote a famous poem in his English prison. \\ . 11. Davies wrote much of his first volume of poems in a common lodginghouse in Sonthwark. John Clare hawked his splendid wares from village, to village, sometimes tramping fifty miles in a single day and selling one copy: Edward Cnpern, the rural postman at Bideford,

wmdd deliver ins letters often with vi rses scribbled on the envelopes.

"In Flanders Fields" was written by Colonel John McCrae. During the second battle of Y-pres. McCrae was in charge ••! a dressing staticm in a hole dug in the hank of the. Ypres Canal. It. was in tho dug-out that he wroto the poem.