Henry Newbolt

ELT 37:4 1994 for probable shrinkage," and he came to believe that "the whole art of writing consists in making one word suffice where other ordinary men use two." The entries in Missing Persons are, if anything, too shrunken for much of literary art to be found in them. While the names of a few contributors are familiar—Noel Annan, Frank Kermode, Jon Stallworthy , for instance—many of the authors are specialists in their biographical subjects. The entries themselves have become rather formulaic ; the opening is usually about the subjects' antecedents, education , and career, the middle about achievements, and the end about their personalities, spouses and descendants. Q. V.'s are relentlessly attached to the mention of other DNB entrants (is it really necessary to follow a quotation from Chaucer with a reminder that he too is in the Dictionary ?) and an awkward parenthesis follows the opening of many entries with the information that the subjects had no brothers or sisters, as the case may be. In his understated way, Stephen said he thought the most valuable feature of the DNB might be the list of sources at the end of the articles. This could not be said of the highly selective bibliographies in Missing Persons. A completely new edition of The Dictionary of National Biography is just now getting underway. It will never replace the original but it should absorb and expand Missing Persons . Until then, this latest addition to the DiVB, while no longer a contribution to English literature from 1880 to 1920, is nevertheless an invaluable resource for the study of that writing. S. P. Rosenbaum _______________ University of Toronto Henry Newbolt Vanessa Furse Jackson. The Poetry of Henry Newbolt: Patriotism Is Not Enough. Greensboro: ELT Press, 1994. 224 pp. $30.00 HENRY NEWBOLT was one of several poets—William Watson and Stephen Phillips also come to mind—who awoke to sudden and unexpected fame in the Nineties, a fame which did not last, Newbolt's poetry, one might say, having been written as if it were consciously designed not to survive World War I. Newbolt's sudden rise to poetic stardom occurred in October 1897 when Elkin Mathews published his first book of poetry, Admirals All and Other Verses, as Number 8 in his Shilling Garland series, an attractive and innovative gathering of little paper-bound booklets which already had brought Phillips to the forefront of new poets with the appearance of his Christ in Hades and Other 538 BOOK REVIEWS Poems as Number 3 of the series. Newbolt's title poem with its stirring celebration of England's great "sea kings"—Raleigh, Essex, and Nelson among them—was typical not only of the twelve poems which made up the volume (including his best remembered poem, "Drake's Drum") but of the kind of thing Newbolt was to do more or less throughout his career. Apart of the vogue in the Nineties for heroic, often jingoistic, verse which Rudyard Kipling and William Ernest Henley were already riding like a wave, Admirals All thus early was a characteristic embodiment of Newbolt's purpose in poetry which remained largely unchanged throughout his life, that is "to sing of English heroism," as Vanessa Furse Jackson, the author of The Poetry of Henry Newbolt, expresses it, "to commemorate the glory of English victories, to pass on to the heroes of today the rich history that was their heritage." Jackson's purpose in her book, wisely, is not to rehabilitate Newbolt in any major way but, reasonably, to pen an apologia for what he did as a poet and as a man and place it in an historical and to some extent a cultural context. Although in her opening page she informs the reader that Newbolt "came out of a very particular and narrowly defined context," not British, but "intensely English," Jackson contends that Newbolt was a man who represents "the Victorian middle class and its ideals of family and of education in what was to prove the golden age of the English public schools." And while admitting that Newbolt "is a minor figure," the author touts him as one "who represents and illuminates major Victorian values and traditions," values...