John Drinkwater
John Drinkwater (1 June 1882 – 25 March 1937) was an English poet and dramatist.Drinkwater was born in Leytonstone, Essex, (now Greater London), to actor/author Albert Edwin Drinkwater (1851-1923) and Annie Beck (née Brown), and worked as an insur
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John Drinkwater (1 June 1882 – 25 March 1937) was an English poet and dramatist.Drinkwater was born in Leytonstone, Essex, (now Greater London), to actor/author Albert Edwin Drinkwater (1851-1923) and Annie Beck (née Brown), and worked as an insurance clerk. In the period immediately before the First World War he was one of the group of poets associated with the Gloucestershire village of Dymock, along with Rupert Brooke and others.
In 1918 he had his first major success with his play Abraham Lincoln. He followed it with others in a similar vein, including Mary Stuart and Oliver Cromwell. In 1924, his Lincoln play was adapted for a two-reel short film made by Lee DeForest and J. Searle Dawley featuring Frank McGlynn Sr. as Lincoln, and made in DeForest's Phonofilm sound-on-film process.[1]
He had published poetry since The Death of Leander in 1906; the first volume of his Collected Poems was published in 1923. He also compiled anthologies and wrote literary criticism (e.g. Swinburne: an estimate (1913)), and later became manager of Birmingham Repertory Theatre.
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