Robert Nichols (Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols) Biography

British poet, born at Manningtree, Essex, educated at Trinity College, Oxford. He was on active service on the Western Front from 1914 until he was invalided out after the Battle of the Somme in 1916. His responses to the war are contained in Invocation (1915) and Ardours and Endurances (1917), which established him as one of the most highly acclaimed younger poets of the day. ‘The Assault’, his best-known poem of the conflict, evokes the destructive havoc and emotional turbulence of an attack in verse of unusual freedom and energy. Much of his poetry combines documentary elements with a vestigially romantic attitude. From 1921 to 1924 he preceded Edmund Blunden as Professor of English at Imperial University, Tokyo. He published two further volumes of poetry, Aurelia (1920), in which rural lyricism predominates, and Fisbo, or the Looking Glass Loaned (1934), a satirical fantasy. His other publications include the novel Under the Yew (1927) and the play Guilty Souls (1922). Fragments of his ambitious unfinished works ‘Don Juan Tenorio the Great’ and ‘The Solitudes of the Sun’ appear in Such Was My Singing (1942), a selected edition of his verse.