2023. British poet Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne contributed to the ferment of new ideas about art, religion, poetry and politics in the early twentieth century. She was a suffragist, socialist and freethinker as well as a poet, and her social networks included artists, feminists, reformers and revolutionaries.
Here are four poems for Armistice Day, by Wilfrid Gibson. Best known for his poems of the First World War, he continued to write about war and its aftermath until the Second World War. For more of his war poems, see Suspense and War Poems Bacchanal (November, 1918) Into the twilight of Trafalgar Square They … Continue reading Wilfrid Gibson poems for Armistice Day, November 2018
This weekend sees the final days of an installation, Dazzle at London’s V&A, centred around Wilfrid Gibson’s war poem Suspense. The installation is one of a series inspired by the use of ‘dazzle’ camouflage used to reduce the risks of submarine attacks on shipping in World War One. Suspense draws on Gibson’s own experience of … Continue reading Wilfrid Gibson Dazzles at the V&A with his poem ‘Suspense’
Although poet and feminist Elizabeth Gibson (later Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne), was a prolific writer, publishing some forty books of prose and poetry, her work is very difficult to find. As I discovered doing my own research, there is hardly any publicly available information about her. As a step towards remedying this, I have produced two … Continue reading New in June 2018: A selection of poems by Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne, plus biographical information.
A selection of thirty poems by Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne, written between 1904 and 1913, and selected by Judy Greenway.
Provides some basic information about Elizabeth Gibson, and links to my articles about her. As I continue to research her life and work, new material will be added.
2016. Compares the changing responses to the First World War in the writings of Wilfrid Gibson and his sister and fellow poet Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne. Revised version of article published in Dymock Poets and Friends, No 15.
I have uploaded four more war poems by Wilfrid Gibson and one by Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne. They are among those mentioned in my latest article, ‘”War is a business of innumerable personal tragedies”: Wilfrid Gibson, Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne and the First World War’. (Published this month in Dymock Poets and Friends, No 15, 2016, it … Continue reading New in March 2016: more war poems by Wilfrid Gibson and Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne
Wilfrid Gibson’s poem ‘Devilswater’, set to music by James Gillespie, appears on the recently launched Brothers Gillespie CD, Songs from the Outlands. The poem, which refers to places near Hexham, Gibson’s Northumberland hometown, was influenced by the regional folk tales and Border Ballads he heard from childhood; I think Gibson would have loved the Gillespies’ … Continue reading New in February 2016: Wilfrid Gibson’s ‘Devilswater’
A brief selection of anti-war poems plus aphorisms on violence, imperialism and oppression, written between 1904 and 1914.