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Francis Thompson Biography

Francis Thompson

(Preston, 1859-London, 1907) English poet.He was the son of a homeopathic doctor.In accordance with his inclinations, well seen by the family, who were Catholic, he was oriented towards the priesthood, and, because of this, he was trained at Ushaw College (Durham) in classical studies.After a change of opinion, advised by his superiors, he later studied medicine, although without ever obtaining a degree, at Owens College in Manchester and in Glasgow.

Francis Thompson

A fervent Catholic, in love with literature and an independent character, he abandoned his family and studies when he realized that he was not understood in his aspirations, still unclear, and he went to London in 1885, where the failures of the various and humble occupations through which he tried to earn a living for four years (match-seller, horse-keeper, bookseller) threw him, because of the growing and bitter sadness of loneliness, the vice of opium, contracted after an illness.

On a piece of blue paper destined to wrap sugar he wrote his first poetry, Dream Encounter ( Dream Tryst , 1888), published by the spouses Meynell, of which the husband, Wilfrid, was editor-journalist and director of the newspaper Merry England , and the wife, Alice, poet and mother of seven children.The marriage in question welcomed and cared for Francis Thompson, who had come to see his entry into public libraries prevented (a truly tragic circumstance for the victim, who read Aeschylus, Blake and De Quincey all hours of the day).

The Meynell family kept him, not without difficulties, away from opium; "During the remaining nineteen years of his life-says biographer Francis Meynell, son of the famous marriage-he saved at least three-quarters of the hardships of his hungry and homeless youth." With the publication of three small volumes of verses, Poems (1893), dedicated to Alice Meynell; Sister Songs (1895), inspired by two girls from the marriage, and New Poems (1897), republished with some additions to the death of the poet, the success of the latter was becoming more established.

The Hound of Heaven , a work defined by Patmore as "one of the most illustrious odes in the English language", is undoubtedly the best of Francis Thompson; It is the religious poetry in which the mystical Catholicism appears most evident, not only of our author, but even of the entire poetic group of mystics of the century.Thompson's poetry, strongly influenced by Crashaw and the metaphysical concept of the seventeenth century, is characterized by a cosmic inspiration, whose central theme is the conception of the world, and has a polychrome of words, an abundance of images, musical tones and archaic or modern versification mastery that more than compensates for their apparent obscurity, their abstruse or confusing ideas and their persistence in the use of analogies and symbols.

The "poet of the return to God", given to eccentric neologisms, also wrote poetry of a very pure inspiration, beautiful in their intimate and reverent simplicity, like Daisy , To a Snow-Flake , In no Strange Land (many of them appeared posthumous) and To a fallen Yew , whose formal magnificence-judged baroque by some-is not limited to the poetic concept, but still attends to the smallest expressive details.

Also of remarkable beauty are the two essays on De Quincey and Shelley (posthumous, 1908) published in the course of their late collaboration in critical magazines.His synthetic judgment of Shelley-"to the end he was the enchanted boy"-seems perfectly applicable to Thompson himself, both naive and mature.Works of journalistic prose such as Salud y santidad ( Health and Holiness , 1905), on ascetic life, and biographies of Catholic figures such as Ignacio de Loyola (1909) and JB de la Salle (1911, already appeared in Merry England ), both posthumous, reveal how the abstract author, childish, shy and distressed by his practical incapacity, found refuge in faith, and not only as poet, but also as a man.

A little more or less since 1898 he lived an existence almost hermit in the Capuchin convent of Pantasaph, Wales; later it happened to Storrington.A victim of the excited tension and disorganization of her entire life, she died of tuberculosis.

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