Richard Middleton

Richard Middleton (1882-1911), from Richard Middleton: The man and his work, 1922. Courtesy Rookebooks.

Richard Barham Middleton (28 October 1882 - 1 December 1911) was an English poet and prose author, who is remembered mostly for his short  ghost stories, in particular The Ghost Ship.

Life

Middleton was born at Staines, Middlesex, the son of Isabel Anne (Keating) and George Middleton, an engineer. He attended Merchant Taylors Shool in London, spent a year at the University of London and passed both Oxford and Cambridge higher certificate examinations in mathematics, physics, and English. Rather than pursue an academic career, though, he went to work in London for the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation bank, as a clerk, in 190s.

In 1905 he joined a literary club, the New Bohemians, where he met Henry Savage, Alfred Machen, Frank Harris, and Lord Alfred Douglas, and began publishing his work in magazines. He is mentioned, in disguised terms, in Arthur Ransome's Bohemia in London.

In 1906 he moved out of his parents' house and into rooms in Blackfriars. The following year, he resigned his job to try to make a full-time living as a writr.

He became an editor at Vanity Fair under Edgar Jepson where he confided to Frank Harris, who was also editing at the magazine at the time, that what he would really wanted to do was make a living as a poet. Shortly thereafter, Harris published Middleton's poem "The Bathing Boy". His work was also published by Austin Harrison in The English Review and he wrote book reviews for The Academy.

An encounter with the young Raymond Chandler is said to have influenced the latter into postponing his career as writer.

Middleton suffered from severe depression, called melancholia at the time.

He spent the last nine months of his life in Brussels. There, in December 1911, he took his life by poisoning himself with chloroform which had been prescribed as a remedy for his condition. He died without having published a book.

Writing

Critical introduction

by Aldous Huxley

The mind of a great poet is a mirror endowed with the power of collecting the diffused and broken light of experience and reverberating it in one bright focal ray of consummated expression. Good poetry is always an account of facts, whether facts of the senses, or of thought and passion and imagination. It is not a collection of vague phrases and unbodied verbiage, but a significant expression of truth. But there is also a kind of simulation poetry, which is an art of making phrases, of linking shadowy, inaccurate words into a melody. This rhetoric a gradus may teach; and by a man of talent it may be brought to a certain specious perfection, from which only time and the ravages of criticism will rub the dazzle and the gilt. At its best, the poetry of words may drug and intoxicate the senses. It can never hope to appeal to any higher faculty.

The work of Richard Middleton belongs to both these categories. Some of his writing may be classed with true poetry; some, and perhaps it is the greater part, with the sham variety. At his most inspired, he displays clarity of thought and sincere emotion, clothed in melody that is sweet, sometimes to over-ripeness. At his worst, he trusts to vaguely "poetical" words and a copious use of not too significant images to cover the defects in the substance of his poetry. His bad verse is like a piece of music, blurred into husky sweetness by some indifferent player who relies for his effects rather on the pedal than on a clean and skilful execution. The fine intricacies of truth, which a great poet labours exactly to express, are by Middleton too often confounded and smudged into a rhetorical dimness, where outlines are lost in a welter of sensuous words.

It is not hard to find examples of Middleton’s rhetorical vagueness and exuberance. His poems abound in such phrases as "stained by the wine of our old ecstasy," "moonlit lilies of the past," "domes of desire and secret halls of sin." They are powdered with "the dust of dreams," and on their smooth tide of harmony swims many a "dreamy ship," many an "argosy" freighted with no poetical treasure beyond its own sonorous name. The use of words without significant content, intoxicating substitutes for thought, has been the bane of almost every mental activity. Not least has poetry suffered. Beautiful as, in its way, rhetoric may be, it is nevertheless a degraded form of poetry.

Of the earth and of the fire, earthly and fiery, Middleton’s best poems are the expression of a passionate paganism. This present world is enough for us, he says, and a man may satisfy his soul with the good things of it, kisses and wine and sunlight. He bids us pluck the roses of the day, adding no philosophic caution as to the limitation of desires. In passion the extreme is the only mean, and, for him, the ideal life is one of continual passion, of unceasing and ecstatic enjoyment of the here and now. If the spirit has any thirst for the infinite, it must satisfy itself in the boundlessness of passion. He has not the vision of the mystic who looks through the beauties of this world into a divine beauty beyond them. To his eyes the things of the earth are opaque, solid, complete in themselves. They are divine, not as being symbols of some universal spirit, but because of the earth-born divinity within themselves — tutelary nymph or little goat-foot genius of the place. Passion, then, and the warm immediacy of paganism are the themes upon which Middleton works. He gives them expression in a rich voluptuous form, that is apt, as we have seen, to decay to mere verbal luxuriance.

The metrical skill displayed in all the poems is considerable, though the range of the musical effects at which Middleton aims is a narrow one. Smoothness and sweetness of numbers, melodies that will sing themselves as they run — these are the characteristics of Middleton’s verse. Many of the metrical devices adapted by the nineteenth century from Elizabethan usage are to be met with in his poems. Such balanced phrases of rhythm as,

  “For I have learnt too many things to live,
  And I have loved too many things to die,”
or as,
  “And there is earth upon my eyes
  And earth upon my singing lips,”

illustrate the successful use of one of the most pleasing of these musical artifices.

Recognition

Middleton's reputation was kept alive by Henry Savage, Edgar Jepson, and Arthur Machen (who wrote an introduction to Middleton's collection, The Ghost Ship) and then later by John Gawsworth. His stories have appeared in many anthologies.

Publications

Poetry

• Poems and Songs (with introduction by Henry Savage). London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912; Toronto: William Briggs, 1912; New York: M. Kennerley, 1913.
• Poems and Songs: Second series. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912; New York: M. Kennerley, 1913.
• Richard Middleton. London: Richards Press, 1937.

Play

• The District Visitor. Baltimore, MD: Norman, Remington, 1924.

Novels

• Queen Melanie And the Woodboy.San Francisco: printed by Johnck & Seeger, 1931.
• The Garden of Avallaunius. London: Twyn Barlwm Press, 1963.

Short fiction

• The Ghost Ship, and other stories. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912; New York: M. Kennerley, 1913; London: Gollancz, 1964. 
• The Pantomime Man. London: Rich & Cowan, 1933.

Non-fiction

• The Day Before Yesterday. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912; New York: M. Kennerley, 1913.
• Monologues (essays). London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913; New York: M. Kennerley, 1914.

 

Letters

• Richard Middleton's Letters to Henry Savage (edited by Henry Savage). London: Mandrake Press, 1929.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

References

• Henry Savage; Richard Middleton: The man And his work. London: Cecil Palmer, 1922.

External links

Poems

• Middleton in The English Poets: An anthology: "The Carol of the Poor Children," "Any Lover, Any Lass," "Autumnal," "Pagan Epitaph"
• Richard Middleton at Poetry Nook (6 poems)

Books

• Works by Richard Middleton at Project Gutenberg

Audio / video

• Richard Middleton public domain audiobooks from LibriVox
• "On The Brighton Road" Creative Commons Audio Book
• About
• Richard Middleton at eNotes.
• "A Poet's Death: Richard Middleton" by Stephen Wayne Foster