Gordon Bottomley

Gordon Bottomley (1874–1948) was an English poet, known particularly for his verse dramas. He was partly disabled by tubercular illness. His main influences were the later Victorian Romantic poets, the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris.

Background
He was born in Keighley, Yorkshire in 1874, the only child of Maria and Alfred Bottomley. He was educated firstly at home by his mother and then at the local Grammar School. Aged seven, Bottomley contracted a tubercular illness that would effect him for the rest of his life. As a result he was invalided for long periods of time and was unable to travel widely or live in a town.

Bottomley became a junior clerk at the Craven Bank in Keighley at the age of 16. However, after an illness in 1891 he was transferred to the Bradford branch and he first visited the theatre and saw the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere’s Fan. This stimulated his interest in plays.

Following another bout of illness in 1892 Bottomley left the bank and moved to Cartmel, Lancashire to live a life of passionate intense meditation and contemplation and began writing poetry. It was here in 1895 that he met Emily Burton and they married in 1905. The couple lived from 1914 in Silverdale, near Carnforth until their deaths. Bottomley died in 1948, outliving his wife by less than a year.

Influences
Bottomley began writing poetry in the 1890s and was influenced by the Romantic poets and even more so by Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His first book The Mickle Drede and Other Verses was printed privately at Kendal in 1896.

Bottomley included many famous writers, poets and artists as friends, whom he kept in contact with mainly through letters. He did make occasional visits to London, and also received visitors at his home. The most notable of these friendships was with the artist Paul Nash. The two men where brought together in 1910 by Nash’s love of poetry and Bottomley’s extensive knowledge of painting. Bottomley encouraged the young artist and in exchange Nash made several designs for Bottomley’s plays that he exhibited or used as illustrations. Despite increasingly divergent tastes in art, their friendship survived and a prolific life-long correspondence between the two men was published in 1955.

Bottomley studied the work of artists and was a dedicated collector. He bought artworks when he could afford to and his friends also gave him their art in gratitude for his support and friendship. In 1949 Bottomley and his wife Emily gave their personal art collection of six hundred paintings, prints and drawings to the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle, Cumbria. The bequest included a nationally important collection of works by the Pre-Raphaelites including pictures by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Arthur Hughes, Ford Madox Brown, Elizabeth Siddal and Simeon Solomon. The collection also included work from artists of other genre including those of Stanley Spencer, Samuel Palmer, Albert Moore, Frederic, Lord Leighton, Henri Fantin-Latour, Lucien Pissarro, William Nicholson, Walter Crane, Charles Conder, Jessie Marion King, William Morris's daughter May Morris, William Rothenstein, Charles Ricketts, and of course Paul Nash.

Bottomley edited the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg in 1922, whom as a correspondent he had encouraged from 1915. The composer Edgar Bainton (1880–1956) was a close associate, and set The Crier by Night to music.

Poetry

 * The Mickle Drede and Other Verses (1896)
 * Poems as White Nights (1899)
 * The Gate of Smaragdus (1904).
 * Chambers of Imagery (1907, 1912)
 * A Vision of Giorgione (1910)
 * Poems of Thirty Years (1925)
 * Darn and lies

Plays

 * The Crier by Night (1902)
 * Midsummer Eve (1905)
 * Laodice and Danaë (1909)
 * The Riding to Lithend (1909)
 * King Lear's Wife (1920)
 * Gruach (1921)
 * Britain's Daughter (1921)
 * Scenes and Plays (1929)
 * Festival Preludes (1930)
 * A Carol for Christmas - Day before Dawn (1930)
 * Lyric Plays (1932)
 * The Acts of St. Peter (1933)
 * Choric Plays (1939)
 * Kate Kennedy (1945)
 * Poems and Plays (1953)

As Editor

 * The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg (1937) edited with Denys Harding