Richard Le Gallienne Biography

British poet and memoirist, born in West Derby, near Liverpool, educated at Liverpool College. Encouraged as a poet by Oliver Wendell Holmes, he published My Ladies' Sonnets in 1887. In 1888 he moved to London and became a publisher's reader. Volumes in Folio (1889) established his reputation as a poet, its refined sensuality manifesting the influence of Oscar Wilde, with whom he was acquainted. A frequent contributor to The Yellow Book, he enjoyed considerable success throughout the 1890s; his recollections of the period were published as The Romantic Nineties (1926). His other prose works include the mildly scandalous novel The Golden Girl (1896) and the topographical reflections of Travels in England (1900). He moved to New York in 1901, where he worked as a journalist. Among his later volumes of poetry are The Lonely Dancer (1913) and The Silk-Hat Soldier (1915), an ill-judged assortment of responses to the First World War. From 1927 onward he lived in France. From a Paris Garret (1936) records his contact with Joyce, Pound, Hemingway, and others. The Quest of the Golden Boy (1960) is a biography by R. W. Egan and G. Smerdon.