35 Facts About Alfred Noyes

Alfred Noyes CBE was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright.

Alfred Noyes' poetry proved popular with the book-buying public, and for the first two decades of his career his books sold well.

Alfred Noyes published five more volumes of poetry from 1903 to 1913, among them The Flower of Old Japan and Poems.

Alfred Noyes modelled his poetry after Tennyson's, and published a critical study of Tennyson in 1932.

Alfred Noyes admired the work of William Morris; his study of that writer was published in 1908.

Alfred Noyes had a special hatred for the work of James Joyce, calling it "filth".

Alfred Noyes decried Joyce's Ulysses, claiming that the novel was obscure and gratuitously vulgar.

In 1907, Noyes married Garnett Daniels, youngest daughter of US Army Colonel Byron G Daniels, a Civil War veteran who was for some years US Consul at Hull.

Alfred Noyes first visited America in February 1913, partly to lecture on world peace and disarmament and partly to satisfy his wife's desire that he should gather fresh experiences in her homeland.

Alfred Noyes accepted, and for the next nine years he and his wife divided their year between England and the US.

Alfred Noyes resigned his professorship in 1923, but continued to travel and lecture throughout the United States for the rest of his life.

Alfred Noyes' work proved to be popular in the United States.

Alfred Noyes's writings were praised by the American reviewers Thomas Bailey Aldrich and William Lyon Phelps, and his poems were reprinted in numerous US newspapers and magazines.

Alfred Noyes's wife died in 1926 at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, where she and Noyes were staying with friends.

Alfred Noyes is often portrayed by hostile critics as a militarist and jingoist.

Alfred Noyes saw looming "the great figures of the Fates back of the conflict, while Mr Noyes sees only the 'five men in black tail-coats' whose cold statecraft is responsible for it".

Alfred Noyes did his patriotic chore as a literary figure, writing morale-boosting short stories and exhortatory odes and lyrics recalling England's military past and asserting the morality of her cause.

Alfred Noyes aided pacifist causes financially, by conrtibuting the whimsical poem A Spell for a Fairy to Princess Mary's Gift Book.

The only fiction Alfred Noyes published in World War II was The Last Man, a science fiction novel whose message could hardly be more anti-war.

Alfred Noyes wrote it after attending a ball held in London soon after the Armistice, where he found himself wondering what the ghosts of the soldiers who had died in the war would say if they could observe the thoughtless frivolity of the dancers.

In 1924 Alfred Noyes published another collection, The Hidden Player, which included a novella, Beyond the Desert: A Tale of Death Valley, already published separately in America in 1920.

In 1929, Alfred Noyes published the first of his three novels, The Return of the Scare-Crow.

In 1927, the year after his first wife's death, Noyes married Mary Angela nee Mayne, widow of Lieutenant Richard Shireburn Weld-Blundell, a member of the old recusant Catholic Weld-Blundell family, who had been killed in World War I Later that year, Noyes himself converted to Catholicism.

Alfred Noyes gives an account of his conversion in his autobiography, Two Worlds for Memory, but sets forth the more intellectual steps by which he was led from agnosticism to the Catholic faith in The Unknown God, a widely read work of Christian apologetics which has been described as "the spiritual biography of a generation".

In 1940 Alfred Noyes published a science fiction novel, The Last Man, in which the human race is almost wiped out by a powerful death ray capable of killing everyone, friend or foe, unless they are in a steel chamber deep under the surface of the sea.

Alfred Noyes's search leads him to Italy, where he finally finds the other survivor, an American girl named Evelyn Hamilton.

Alfred Noyes's companion turns out to be the villain of the story.

In 1940, Alfred Noyes returned to North America, where he lectured and advocated the British war position.

In 1949, Alfred Noyes returned to his home on the Isle of Wight.

In 1955, Alfred Noyes published the satirical fantasy novel The Devil Takes A Holiday, in which the Devil, in the guise of Mr Lucius Balliol, an international financier, comes to Santa Barbara, California, for a pleasant little holiday.

Alfred Noyes finds however, that his work is being so efficiently performed by humankind that he has become redundant.

In 1957, Alfred Noyes published his last book, The Accusing Ghost, or Justice for Casement.

Alfred Noyes immediately responded with a letter to The Irish Press in which he explained why he had assumed the diaries were authentic, confessed he might have been misled, and called for the setting up of a committee to examine the original documents and settle the matter.

In 1957, therefore, Alfred Noyes published The Accusing Ghost, or Justice for Casement, a stinging rebuke of British policy in which, making full amends for his previous harsh judgement, he argued that Casement had indeed been the victim of a British Intelligence plot.

Alfred Noyes died at the age of 77, and is buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Totland, Isle of Wight.