George Heath

George Heath (1844 - 1869)

George Heath was born in the village of Gratton in the Staffordshire Moorlands on March 9th, 1844. Educated at the village school, he worked on his father’s farm, then was apprenticed to a builder. Around this time he decided to become a poet (or to quote his journal: “fancy indulged in wildly beautiful dreams to the curl of the shavings and rasp of the saw”) and he wrote his first verses in 1863. The following year, while renovating the church in the neighbouring village of Horton, he caught a chill, which later developed into consumption.

Now unable to work, he devoted himself to his writing. Fully aware of his lack of formal education, he spent much of his time in study. His curriculum was not confined to poetry and the English language however, he also studied history, took lessons in Latin and Greek from a local vicar, and his Saturdays were devoted to arithmetic. His first slim volume, Simple Poems, was published locally in 1865. His second book, Heart Strains, appeared the following year and there were public readings of his work in Leek and Stafford. He embarked on several long works, including a history of his own family called ‘The Country Woman’s Tale’, an epic entitled ‘The Doom of Babylon’, and, perhaps his most ambitious work, ‘Icarus’, but they all were unfinished.

George Heath died on May 5th, 1869, at the age of 25. His endeavours had been encouraged in life by a close circle of friends and this support continued after the poet’s death. An edition of his selected poems was published in 1870 and a memorial stone was erected over his grave in Horton churchyard. The epitaph on the stone was taken from one of his own poems:

“His life is a fragment-a broken clue- His harp had a musical string or two, The tension was great, and they sprang and flew, And a few brief strains-a scattered few- Are all that remain to mortal view Of the marvellous song the young man knew.”

It is impossible to assess the merits of George Heath’s poetry without referring to the circumstances in which it was written. Given his background it is amazing that he wrote at all. Given the fact that he wrote the majority of his work when he was effectively dying, invests all his poems with a poignancy which defeats any attempt at objective criticism. Added to this is the effect of the passage of time. He achieved little more than local fame (as ‘the Moorland Poet’ and ‘the Invalid Poet’) during his own life. However, after the publication of the first Memorial Edition in 1870, Robert Buchanan wrote an article about Heath for Good Words (which was later reprinted in his 1873 collection of essays, Master Spirits) which brought his name to a wider audience. Buchanan makes the obvious comparisons between Heath and his friend, David Gray, the Scottish poet, who had also suffered an early death from consumption, and at one point writes:

“No descriptions of nature as loving, as beautiful as those in the ‘Luggie,’ and no music as fine as the music of Gray’s songs and sonnets. But there is something else, something that David Gray did not possess, with all his marvellous lyrical faculty, and this something is great intellectual self-possession combined with the faculty of self-analysis and a growing power of entering into the minds of others. The poem ‘Icarus, or the Singer’s Tale,’ though only a fragment, is more remarkably original than any published poem of Gray’s, and in grasp and scope of idea it is worthy of any writer.”

After the second printing of the Memorial Edition in 1880, George Heath’s fame receded again to the small area of Staffordshire where he had spent his life, and his poetry was forgotten. What remained was the perfect Romantic image. The young man, inspired to write poetry by forces unknown, struck down in youth, lying in a village churchyard, his grave overgrown with weeds. George Heath foresaw his own fate and a constant theme in his work, which runs alongside his understandable obsession with death, is the frustration of unfulfilled ambition.



Publications

 * Preludes. privately published, 1865.
 * for later printings the title was altered to Simple Poems.
 * Heart Strains. privately published, 1866.
 * The Poems of George Heath, The Moorland Poet (first Memorial Edition). London: Bemrose and Sons, 1870.
 * The Poems of George Heath, The Moorland Poet (second Memorial Edition). London: Simpkin, Marshall; Hanley: Allbut and Daniel, 1880.