Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, English journalist and author, was born in
Kensington on May 29 in the year 1874. He was educated at St. Paul´s
school, where, at an unusually early age, he gained the Milton prize for
English verse. He left school in 1891 with the idea of studying art. But
though he early developed, and indeed retained, a talent for draftsmanship
of a very distinctive kind, his natural bent was literary, and he went through
the usual apprenticeship of free-lance journalism, occasional reviewing and
work in a publisher´s office.
In 1901 he married France Blogg. In 1900, after having produced a volume
of poems, The Wild Knight, which led good critics to expect great things of
him as a poet, he became a regular contributor of signed articles to The
Speaker and the Daily News. Between 1901 and 1929 he produced a quantity
of works like The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) or The Napoleon of
Notting Hill (1904). During the same period Chesterton wrote a lot of verse,
some good, some bad - none of it indifferent. At its best it is very good
indeed. A well-known English critic once observed of his light verse that,
whereas there had been many in all ages who could write comic verse,
Chesterton was one of the very few who could write comic poetry. The
compliment was deserved. His more serious verse has been held to give him
rank as the last of a great rhetorical poets. Like all rhetorical poets he is
sometimes tinselly, but his best poems show what rhetorical can be at it
best. Of these are Lepanto (1911) and A Song of the Wheels written during
the railway strike of 1911.
If a prediction may be ventured, Chesterton will be remembered longest by
his poems and his work in literary critics. Many will regret that he tried his
hand so little at playwriting and spent so much time on polemical
journalism. Nearly all will deplore the volume of his output. None will
question the reality of his achievement at its highest, or the strength and
purity of...