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A.L. Rowse

A.L. Rowse’s Followers (12)

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A.L. Rowse


Born
in Tregonissey, Cornwall, The United Kingdom
December 04, 1903

Died
October 03, 1997

Genre

Influences
Arthur Quiller-Couch


Alfred Leslie Rowse, CH FBA, known professionally as A. L. Rowse and to his friends and family as Leslie, was a prolific Cornish historian. He is perhaps best known for his poetry about Cornwall and his work on Elizabethan England. He was also a Shakespearean scholar and biographer. He developed a widespread reputation for irascibility and intellectual arrogance.

One of Rowse's great enthusiasms was collecting books, and he owned many first editions, many of them bearing his acerbic annotations. For example, his copy of the January 1924 edition of The Adelphi magazine edited by John Middleton Murry bears a pencilled note after Murry's poem In Memory of Katherine Mansfield: 'Sentimental gush on the part of JMM. And a bad poem. A.L.R.'

Upon his
...more

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More books by A.L. Rowse…
Quotes by A.L. Rowse  (?)
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“When you consider the superstitions and the imaginings of the old Cornish country-folk up to my grandmother's day, how their lives were swaddled in them from the cradle to the grave, their daily actions in large part determined by them - so many things you would not think of doing, like starting a journey on a Friday, or looking at the moon through a pane of glass, or failing to wear something new on Whitsunday - their minds haunted by ghosts and fears, you have a fair idea of what the minds of these people in the sixteenth century were like. It was a life full of shadows that frightened them and dangers that might come home to them; how much more so in those days when their fears had the sanction, and even the corroboration, of the elect and the intelligent: when a uniform religion existed to enforce its lessons and draw the moral. However, no doubt it filled up life for them, made it more interesting and exciting, more mysterious and incalculable; it added a dimension to it, where the modern uneducated, rid of their fears and ghosts, are apt to find life empty and void of meaning.”
A. L. Rowse

“O moon that makes restless the hearts of men,
That lays an insane beam upon their mind,
And laughing makes men mad.

- Sunday Night: Truro
A.L. Rowse, Poems of Deliverance

“In the inmost recesses of consciousness,
The wound opening inwards,
The spirit too proud to admit an injury,
Incessantly grazed and torn again
By the insensitive, the enemy that hates
Difference, quality that escapes submission
To common complacency, impure hypocrisy-
That would annihilate what is uncommon,
Challenging their meanness, their lack of standards
With something electric and alive, a vibrancy
That offers not a new Heaven and a new Earth
But life, more life and light-
To be rejected.

- The Parting
A.L. Rowse, Poems of Deliverance

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