Quick Facts
Biography
Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols (6 or 16 September 1893 – 17 December 1944) was an English writer, known as a war poet of World War I, and a playwright.
Life and career
The son of the poet John Bowyer Buchanan Nichols, Robert Nichols was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford. He served in the Royal Artillery as an officer in 1914, in the fighting at Loos and the Somme. He was invalided out in 1916, after suffering from shell shock.
He began to give poetry readings, in 1917. In 1918 he was a member of an official British propaganda mission to the USA, where he also gave readings.
After the war he moved in social circles in London; Aldous Huxley became a long-term friend and correspondent, and Nichols wooed Nancy Cunard with sonnets, but married Norah Denny in 1922 at St Martin-in-the-Fields. He was Professor of English Literature at the University of Tokyo from 1921 to 1924, and later worked in the theatre and cinema. The play Wings over Europe (1928), with Maurice Browne, was a Broadway hit. Nichols wrote several prose fictions, including The Smile of the Sphinx, a fantasy set in the Middle East and Golgotha & co., a satirical fantasy featuring the Wandering Jew, the return of Christ and a future war. These fictions were collected in Nichols' book Fantastica.
He lived in Germany and Austria in 1933–34. He then settled in the south of France, leaving in June 1940. He died at the age of 51, and is buried at St Mary's, Lawford, Essex, next to the family home, Lawford Hall.
On 11 November 1985, Nichols was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
Works
- Invocation (1915)
- Ardours and Endurances (1917)
- A Faun's Holiday & Poems & Phantasies (1917)
- Sonnets to Aurelia (1920)
- The Smile of the Sphinx (1920)
- Fantastica : being the smile of the Sphinx and other tales of imagination (1923)
- Twenty Below (1926) with Jim Tully
- Wings Over Europe (1928) play
- Fisbo or the Looking Glass Loaned (1934) verse satire aimed at Osbert Lancaster
- A Spanish Triptych (1936) poems
- Such was My Singing (1942) poems
"Noon" "Thanksgiving"
Settings of plays
In 1919 the English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji wrote a Music to “The Rider by Night” (not extant in full).