Home > Ralph Hodgson

He was born in Darlington. From about 1890 he worked for a number of London publications. He was a comic artist, signing himself 'Yorick', and became art editor on C. B. Fry's Weekly Magazine of Sports and Out-of-Door Life. His first poetry collection, The Last Blackbird and Other Lines, appeared in 1907. He seems to have covered his tracks in relation to much of his life; he was averse to publicity. It is said that his father was a coal merchant, and that he ran away from home while at school. He did keep up a copious correspondence with other poets and literary figures, including those he met in his time in Japan such as Takeshi Saito .

In 1912 he founded a small press, At the Sign of the Flying Fame, with the illustrator Claud Lovat Fraser (1890-1921) and the writer and journalist Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948). It published his collection The Mystery (1913). Hodgson received the Edmond de Polignac Prize in 1914, for a musical setting of The Song of Honour, and was included in the Georgian Poetry anthologies. The press became inactive in 1914 as World War I broke out and he and Lovat joined the armed forces (it did continue until 1923). Hodgson was in the Royal Navy and then the British Army. His reputation was established by Poems (1917).

His first wife Janet (nee Chatteris) died in 1920. He then married Muriel Fraser (divorced 1932). Shortly after that he accepted an invitation to teach English at Tohoku UniversityTohoku University (; Tohoku Daigaku abbreviated as Tohokudai , located in Sendai, Miyagi prefecture, is one of Japan's most prestigious national universities. The University has ten faculties with a total of around 15,000 students (in 2003). The universit in Sendai, JapanJapan (, Nippon/Nihon literally "the origin of the sun") is a country in East Asia situated on a chain of islands east of the Asian continent on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. The largest of these islands are, from north to south, Hokkaido , Honsh. In 1933 he married Lydia Aurelia Bolliger, a American missionary and teacher there.

In 1938 Hodgson left Japan, visited friends in the UK including Siegfried SassoonSiegfried Loraine Sassoon ( September 8, 1886 September 1, 1967) was an English poet and author. He became known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I, but later won acclaim for his prose work. Biography Early life and education Sasso (they had met 1919) and then settled permanently with Aurelia in Minerva, OhioMinerva is a village located in Carroll, Columbiana, and Stark counties in Ohio. As of the 2000 census, the village had a total population of 3,934. Geography Minerva is located at 40°43'44" North, 81°6'7" West (40. 728830, -81. According to the United St. He was involved there in publishing, under the Flying Scroll imprint, and some academic contacts. He died in Minerva.