Sir Edward Marsh (Sir Edward Howard Marsh) Biography

British editor, patron of the arts, and translator, born in London, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Having entered the Civil Service in 1896, he became private secretary to Winston S. Churchill in 1905. In association with his close friend Rupert Brooke, he launched the Georgian Poetry series in 1912; Marsh edited each of the five volumes, though to most of their large readership he was known only as ‘E.M.’, the initials appended to his prefaces. He prepared the posthumous editions of Brooke's Letters from America (1916) and Collected Poems (1918); the introduction to the latter was separately published in 1918 as Rupert Brooke: A Memoir. Marsh shared his considerable royalties from the Georgian Poetry anthologies with his contributors and was noted for his generosity to many artists and writers, including James Joyce, for whom he secured a Civil List pension at Ezra Pound's suggestion. As a translator, he produced versions of The Fables of Jean De La Fontaine (two volumes, 1931), the Odes of Horace (1941), and The Sphinx of Bagatelle (1951) by Princess Marthe Bibescu. Minima (1947) contains examples of his own poetry. A Number of People (1939) is a volume of his reminiscences. He was knighted in 1937. Christopher Hassall's Edward Marsh appeared in 1959.