Alfred Edgar Coppard

Alfred Edgar Coppard Poems

Alfred Edgar Coppard Biography

Alfred Edgar Coppard was an English writer, noted for his influence on the short story form, and poet. Coppard was born the son of a tailor and a housemaid in Folkestone, and had little formal education. Coppard grew up in difficult, poverty-stricken circumstances; he later described his childhood as "shockingly poor" and Frank O'Connor described Coppard's early life as "cruel". He left school at the age of nine to work as an errand boy for a Jewish trouser maker in Whitechapel during the period of the Jack the Ripper murders. In the early 1920s, and still unpublished, he was in Oxford and a leading light of a literary group, the New Elizabethans, who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama. W. B. Yeats sometimes attended the meetings. At this period he met Richard Hughes and Edgell Rickword, amongst others. Coppard was a member of the Independent Labour Party for a period. Coppard's fiction was influenced by Thomas Hardy and on its initial publication, favourably compared to that of H. E. Bates. Coppard's short stories were praised by Ford Madox Ford and Frank O'Connor. Coppard's work enjoyed a surge in popularity in the US after his Selected Tales was chosen as a selection by the Book of the Month Club. In the profile in Twentieth Century Authors, Coppard lists Abraham Lincoln as the politician he most admired. Coppard also listed Sterne, Dickens, James, Hardy, Shaw, Chekhov and Joyce as authors he valued; conversely, he expressed a dislike for the works of D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling. Some of Coppard's collections, such as Adam and Eve and Pinch Me and Fearful Pleasures, contain stories with fantastic elements, either of supernatural horror or allegorical fantasy. Stableford argues Coppard's fantasy has a similar style to that of Walter de la Mare and that "many of his mercurial and oddly plaintive fantasies are deeply disturbing". In Nancy Cunard's 1937 book Authors take Sides on the Spanish War, Coppard took the side of the Republicans. A.E. Coppard was the uncle of George Coppard, a British soldier who served with the Machine Gun Corps during World War I, known for his memoirs With A Machine Gun to Cambrai.)

The Best Poem Of Alfred Edgar Coppard

Truant

HiDE all your snares, vain town
Gilded with cross and crown,
Lest your foul streams deter
The day's new worshipper.

Break in my heart, O chains,
Your self-inflicted pains,
And every shackle fall
From me for good and all.

Let the grey dawn propose
Conjunction with the rose,
And the blue noon fulfil
indolently its will.

Where the warm vales repeat
The ecstacy of heat,
And the slow forest heaves
in transport all its leaves,

i can uplift my eyes
To th' enduring paradise,
And cast white flames in the air
Of proud unsecret prayer.

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