W. H. Davies Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
William Henry Davies was born on April 20, 1871, in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, into a working-class family shaped by the insecure wages and sudden accidents of industrial Britain. Orphaned young, he knew early the twin pressures that would haunt his work: the need to earn and the need to escape. Newport, with its docks and traffic between coal country and sea routes, taught him that lives could be spent moving yet never arriving. In later years he would write as if he were always trying to rescue attention itself from the machinery of getting by.

Restless and frequently in trouble, Davies drifted into a life of casual labor and tramping, sleeping in lodging houses and hedgerows, learning the unromantic routines of hunger and weather. The late Victorian era offered moral sermons about thrift and improvement, but it also produced a large underclass of itinerants. Davies absorbed its argot and its social codes, and he trained his memory on small mercies - a crust, a fire, a birdcall - that could make deprivation feel briefly humane. That early closeness to the precarious and the overlooked would become the emotional engine of his poems and later prose.

Education and Formative Influences
Davies had little formal schooling, and his real education came from the road and from reading snatched in odd moments. He encountered the English lyric tradition and the Bible, and he developed an ear for plain speech that could carry moral weight without ornament. A formative catastrophe fixed his identity as both survivor and observer: in 1899, attempting to jump a train in Canada during his wanderings, he lost a foot, an injury that ended certain kinds of work and intensified his inwardness. The convalescent years forced him to turn experience into art, and to treat attention - to nature, to faces, to the play of light - as a discipline rather than a leisure.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
Determined to write, Davies returned to Britain and in 1905 issued his first notable volume, The Soul's Destroyer and Other Poems. A decisive turning point followed when his vivid autobiography, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), brought him recognition and a network of patrons and fellow writers; it captured tramp life without sentimentality, yet with a poet's instinct for emblem and scene. His career then widened through steady publication: poems of country observation and moral reflection, and prose that continued to mine the years of vagrancy for insight into class and character. In later life, marriage and relative stability did not erase the earlier condition of being an outsider looking in; rather, it gave him a vantage point from which to judge modern speed, urban distraction, and the costs of respectability.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Davies wrote with a deliberate simplicity that was not naive but sharpened by scarcity. His lines often hinge on a single turn - from bustle to stillness, from appetite to gratitude - and the psychology behind them is the psychology of a man who had watched his own attention threatened by worry. His best-known admonition, "What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?" , is not a pastoral slogan so much as a recovered survival skill: the poor are trained to scan for danger and opportunity, yet Davies insists that the soul also needs unprofitable looking. Even the variant, "A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare". , carries the same self-diagnosis - that care, unchallenged, becomes a kind of inner landlord demanding rent from every moment.

His themes return obsessively to beauty, youth, and the stubborn dignity of the senses. "As long as I love Beauty I am young". reads like a credo from a man whose body had been maimed and whose social standing had been fragile; beauty becomes the one possession not reducible to wages or loss, a way to remain inwardly unbroken. Stylistically, he favored clear images, short stanzas, and a speaking voice that sounds conversational until it suddenly reveals a hard-earned ethic: notice the world, resist hurry, and do not confuse busyness with living. Beneath the apparent calm is a biography of anxiety and deprivation, transformed into a plea for presence.

Legacy and Influence
Davies died on September 26, 1940, in England, having become one of the defining English-language voices of early 20th-century nature lyric and working-class testimony. His influence rests less on technical innovation than on moral clarity: he made attention itself a subject, insisting that modern life steals it first and offers comforts later. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp remains a key document of itinerant life at the turn of the century, and "Leisure" endures as a line-sharp reproach to speed, still quoted because it speaks to any era that confuses motion with meaning.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by H. Davies, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Live in the Moment - Poetry - Cat.

• W.H. Davies poem Leisure: 'Leisure' is a poem by W.H. Davies that emphasizes the importance of taking time to appreciate nature and life's simple pleasures.
• William Henry Davies family: William Henry Davies was born to Mary Ann Davies and Francis Boase Davies, and was raised in a large family in Wales.
• Wh davies poem the rain: 'The Rain' by W.H. Davies reflects on the healing and transformative power of nature, emphasizing renewal and growth.
• W.H. Davies education: Davies attended Alexander School in Newport but left formal education to travel and live an adventurous life.
• w.h. davies what is this life: 'What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?' is the opening line from his famous poem 'Leisure.'
• w.h davies introduction: W.H. Davies was a Welsh poet known for his simple and lyrical style, often depicting the struggles of life and the beauty of nature.
• Wh davies poems: W.H. Davies wrote notable poems such as 'Leisure,' 'The Rain,' and 'The Soul's Destroyer.'
• How old was W. H. Davies? He became 69 years old

• 1920 The Song of Life, and Other Poems (Book)
• 1911 Songs of Joy and Others (Book)
• 1908 The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (Book)
• 1908 Nature Poems and Others (Book)
• 1905 The Soul's Destroyer and Other Poems (Book)

• Wikipedia