John Edgell Rickword, MC was an English poet, critic, journalist and literary editor.
15 Facts About Edgell Rickword
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Edgell Rickword became one of the leading communist intellectuals active in the 1930s.
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Edgell Rickword served in the British Army in World War I, having joined the Artists' Rifles in 1916, before being commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Berkshire Regiment in October 1917.
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Edgell Rickword volunteered to cross the Haute Deule Canal and make a reconnaissance.
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Edgell Rickword was a published war poet, and collected his early verse in Behind the Eyes.
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On 4 January 1919, Edgell Rickword developed an illness that was diagnosed as a "general vascular invasion which had resulted in general septicaemia".
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Edgell Rickword's left eye was so badly infected that they thought it necessary to remove it to prevent the infection from spreading to the other eye.
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James Boswell 8.
Edgell Rickword went up to Pembroke College, Oxford in 1919, staying only four terms reading French literature, and leaving when he married.
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Edgell Rickword's work appeared in the Oxford Poetry 1921 anthology, with Blunden, Golding, Porter, Graves, Richard Hughes and Frank Prewett.
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Edgell Rickword reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement, which led to a celebrated review of T S Eliot's The Waste Land.
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Edgell Rickword started the Calendar of Modern Letters literary review, now highly regarded, in March 1925.
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Edgell Rickword joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934, and became increasingly active in political work during the period of the Spanish Civil War; while still writing poetry.
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Edgell Rickword was friendly with Randall Swingler, the 'official' poetry voice of the CPGB, and with Jack Lindsay, his only real rival as a theoretician.
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Edgell Rickword's associates included James Boswell, who was the art editor; they had met around 1929.
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Edgell Rickword had an upbeat view at the time on the possibilities of popular culture and radical politics, and the circulation rose as he broadened the publication's scope from popular political poetry.