John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater (1882–1937) was an English poet and dramatist, born in Leytonstone, Essex, and brought up in Oxford and Birmingham. He worked for many years as an insurance clerk while writing, was one of the Dymock poets, and appeared in all five volumes of Georgian Poetry. He also became closely associated with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

The poems here come from Poems 1908-1919 (1919), which gathers his verse of the decade and includes the long poems Reverie and The Fires of God, and from Tides (1917), a small book printed by the Beaumont Press, of which only the poems not already in the larger collection are given. His verse plays, among them Abraham Lincoln (1918), are not included.