Robert Nichols

Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols (1893-1944) was an English writer, known as a war poet of World War I, and a playwright.

He was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford. He served in the Royal Artillery as an officer from 1914 to 1914, in the fighting at Loos and the Somme. He was then invalided out, with 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.

After the war he moved in social circles in London; Aldous Huxley became a long-term frend and correspondent, and he wooed Nancy Cunard with sonnets. He was Professor of English Literature at the University of Tokyo, from 1921 to 1924. He then worked in the theatre and cinema. The play Wings over Europe (1928), with Maurice Browne , was a Broadway hit.

He was in Germany and Austria in 1933-34. He settled in the south of France, leaving in June 1940.

His father was John Bowyer Buchanan Nichols , the poet. He married in 1922 Norah Denny.

Works

• Invocation (1915)
• Ardours and Endurances (1917)
• A Faun's Holiday & Poems & Phantasies (1917)
• Sonnets to Aurelia (1920)
• Twenty Below (1926) with Jim Tully
• A Spanish Triptych (1936) poems
• Such was My Singing (1942) poems

Reference

• Putting Poetry First: A Life Of Robert Nichols, 1893-1944 (2003) William and Anne Charlton