A Man’s Life and a Woman’s Death: — Arthur H. Adams’s Female Writer of Genius
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26686/knznq.v2i1.597Abstract
Poet, novelist, playwright, librettist, journalist, and one-time literary editor of Sydney's Bulletin, New Zealander Arthur H. Adams (1872-1936) had a career as writer that earned him some considerable reputation in his time. His enduring monument has been the fine late-Romantic elegiac poem `The Dwellings of our Dead', which has appeared in Oxford and Penguin anthologies and carries a strong emotional charge, mainly by way of its plangent music. It was probably written in a semi-trance while Adams was convalescing in Chefoo (or Chi-fu) in China from an almost fatal bout of enteric fever. He himself considered it his best – if, as I believe, this is the poem that in his novel A Man's Life he refers to as composed in such circumstances.
Downloads
References
Adams, Arthur H. A Man's Life. London: Eveleigh, Nash & Grayson, 1929.
Hamilton, Stephen and Nelson Wattie. 'Adams, Arthur H.' The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. Ed. Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998, 1-2.
Review: 1888-1971. Ed. Kevin Jones and Brent Southgate. University of Otago: Bibliography Room, 1972.
Thompson, G.E. A History of the University of Otago. Dunedin: J. Wilkie, 1921.
Wattie, Nelson. 'Adams, Arthur Henry'. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: Volume 3: 1901-1920. Gen. ed. Claudia Orange. Auckland University Press and Department of Internal Affairs, 1996, 2-3.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
