ABSTRACT
Francis Thompson was born in 1859 into a Catholic family. He went to London to follow his father's profession as a doctor, but soon became a down-and-out. The efforts of a prostitute and his first publishers, Wilfred and Alice Meynell, rescued him from total oblivion. His three volumes of poetry were Poems (1893), Sister Songs (1895) and New Poems (1897). Much of T.'s work is in the C19 Parnassian tradition, but in addition, he drew sustenance from C17 religious poetry, especially Crashaw and Cowley. Arthur Symons called T. 'a verbal intelligence', and Lionel Johnson (letter to K. Tynan) wrote: 'He has done more to harm the English language than the worst American newspapers.' T.'s work is one of the last important flourishings of poetic diction as a medium entirely separate from everyday speech. It is a period piece, but of some distinction.
