Alfred Noyes author page

Alfred Noyes biography

Alfred Noyes was an English poet whose life dates are given as 1880–1958. He built a full career as a writer and intellectual, and his poetry often used Romantic and ballad-like forms influenced by earlier English poets including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare.

Noyes’s major early work Drake: An English Epic was published in 1906–08 after serialisation in Blackwood’s Magazine. The poem is a twelve-book epic in blank verse about life at sea, a subject that became one of his recurring literary interests.

His poem “The Highwayman” is one of his most frequently referenced works. Noyes wrote “The Highwayman” when he was twenty-four, and the poem tells a dark romantic story in ballad form about a highwayman and Bess, the landlord’s daughter.

Noyes also wrote The Torch-Bearers, a three-volume work published in 1922, 1925 and 1930. The project was inspired by a 1917 visit to a new telescope being installed at Mount Wilson in California.

Noyes’s writing for younger readers included “Flower of Old Japan” and “Forest of Wild Thyme”, works that explored the world through children’s imaginative experience. His autobiography, Two Worlds for Memory, was published in 1953, and he died on 25 June 1958.