Frank Pearce Sturm

Frank Pearce Sturm (18 June 1879-1942) was an English poet and translator.

Life
Sturm was born in Longsight, Manchester, on 18 June 1879, the son and eldest of 3 children of Bessie and William Pearce Sturm. His father was a shipping merchant, who later lost everything in the Boer War.

Sturm's sister Dorothy remembered that he was schooled in Didsbury, and then apprenticed to a chemist for 2 years before entering university. He entered the University of Aberdeen in 1902, aged 22, studying medicine.

He was a prodigious writer in early adulthood. Through his university years he wrote and published in the local newspapers, doing hackwork of all kinds to earn money to support himself in the face of his father's financial troubles. He was publishing his own poetry by January 1903.

Sturm is best known for his 1906 translations of Charles Baudelaire.

Sturm was known to his friends as "a man of great charm, and even greater irreverence for the things that interested.him.",

Sturm and Yeats
During the 1920s Sturm collaborated and corresponded with W.B. Yeats, particularly in matters of astrology. After the publication of A Vision, Yeats referred to Sturm in correspondence as "a very learned doctor in the North of England who sends me profound and curious extracts from ancient philosophies on the subject of gyres," and in another letter as:
 * a certain doctor in the North of England who sits every night for one half hour in front of a Buddha lit with many candles &ndash his sole escape from a life of toil.

Yeats wrote, on the bookplate of Sturm's copy of A Vision, that he had "written A Vision for two people one of whom was a learned doctor in the North of England, that doctor was the man to whom I have given this book."

Recognition
Yeats included Sturm's short poem, "Still-heart," in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, 1936.

Poetry

 * An Hour of Reverie. London: Elkin Mathews, 1905.
 * Eternal Helen (illustrated by T. Sturge Moore). Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1921.

Non-fiction

 * Umbrae Silentes. London: Philosophical Publishing House, 1918.

Collected editions

 * Life, Letters, and Collected Work (edited by Richard Taylor). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1969.

Translated

 * Charles Baudelaire, Poems. London & New York: Walter Scott (Canterbury Poets), 1906.

Except where noted, bibliographical informtion courtesy WorldCat.

Poems by Frank Pearce Sturm

 * 1) Still-heart