Theodore Watts-Dunton

“What power is this?” asks the voice in Watts-Dunton’s opening poem, summoned toward sheer, snow-cloaked peaks and the “Dumb Mother” of earth. The answer feels less like a name than a spell: wonder.

In late-Victorian England, Theodore Watts-Dunton wrote poetry and criticism that reached devoted readers, while his name remained little known beyond literary circles. James Douglas traces the making of this poet, novelist, and critic—and tells how, as a boy in Ireland, he waited for the Athenæum to arrive, enthralled by essays whose author he could not identify. Those pages opened “realms of gold” to Douglas, but Watts-Dunton’s critical work remained scattered through journals rather than gathered into books. What was the secret behind the writing that could turn a solitary boy’s world into a romantic paradise?

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