L.A.G. Strong



Leonard Alfred George Strong (1896 – 17 August 1958) was an English poet, novelist, and journalist, poet and a director of the publishers Methuen Ltd..

Life
He was born in Plymouth, of a half-Irish father and Irish mother, and was educated at Brighton College (where in later life he was a governor) and at Wadham College, Oxford (Open Classical Scholar). There he came under the influence of W. B. Yeats.

He worked as an Assistant Master at Summer Fields, Oxford, between 1917–19 and 1920–30, and as a Visiting Tutor at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He was a director of the publishers Methuen Ltd. from 1938 until his death. For many years he was a governor of his old school, Brighton College.

He was a versatile writer of more than 20 novels, as well as plays, children's books, poems, biography, criticism, and film scripts. His Selected Poems appeared in 1931, and The Body's Imperfections: Collected Poems in 1957. He also collaborated with Cecil Day-Lewis in compiling anthologies.

Recognition
Some of his poems were set to music by Arthur Bliss. His novel The Brothers was filmed in 1947 by the Scottish director David MacDonald.

Verse

 * Dublin Days
 * The Lowery Road
 * Difficult Love
 * Northern Light
 * Call to The Swan
 * The Body's Imperfection

Fiction

 * Dewer Rides
 * The English Captain
 * The Jealous Ghost
 * The Garden
 * The Brothers
 * Don Juan and the Wheelbarrow
 * Sea Wall
 * Corporal Tune
 * The Seven Arms
 * Mr Sheridan's Umbrella
 * Tuesday Afternoon
 * The Last Enemy
 * The Swift Shadow
 * The Open Sky
 * Sun on the Water
 * The Bay
 * The Unpractised Heart
 * All Fall Down
 * The Director
 * Othello's Occupation
 * Travellers (James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1945)
 * Trevannion
 * Darling Tom
 * The Hill of Howth
 * Deliverance
 * Treason in the Egg
 * Light above the Lake (posthumous)
 * A Gift from Christy Keogh (in The Queen's Book of the Red Cross)

Belles lettres

 * Common Sense about Poetry
 * A Letter to W. B. Yeats
 * (with M. Redlich) Life in English Literature
 * The Hansom Cab and The Pigeons
 * The Minstrel Boy
 * The Man who asked Questions
 * Shake Hands and Come out Fighting
 * John McCormack: The Story of a Singer
 * English for Pleasure
 * A Tongue in your Head
 * The Sacred River
 * Maud Cherrill
 * Personal Remarks
 * The Writer's Trade
 * Dr Quicksilver
 * Flying Angel
 * The Rolling Road
 * Green Memory (autobiography, posth., 1961).

Edited

 * The Best Poems of 1923.