Robert Stephen Hawker
Robert Stephen Hawker (* December 3, 1803 or 1804 in Stoke Damerell (now Plymouth), England; † August 15, 1875 in Plymouth ) was a priest, author, poet and bookseller. His most famous work is the poem The Song of the Western Men from the year 1825.
Biography
Hawker was born the son of a priest in Stoke Damerell. He studied at Oxford and married at the age of nineteen forty-one his godmother Charlotte I'an.
Hawker had written his first poems already in the Cheltenham Grammar School and published them in 1821 under the title tendrils.
The Song of the Western Men, also known as Trelawny, is a poem that was first released on September 1826 at The Royal Devonport Telegraph and Plymouth in Plymouth Chronicle newspaper. It includes not only the poetic memoir of the events around the Bishop Sir Jonathan Trelawny (1650-1721), a traditional proverb from Cornwall and later received for the piece of music a text extension. It was published by Hawker originally anonymous and only 26 years later, in 1852, attributed by Charles Dickens Hawker.
1832 followed the publication Records of the Western Shore, the poem The Song of the Western Men used in the Hawker also.
Eight years later, in 1840, appeared Ecclesia: A Volume of Poems, 1843 Reeds Shaken with the Wind, 1846 Echoes from Old Cornwall and 1864 The Quest of the Sangraal: Chant the First Exeter.
He published in 1870 under the title Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall ( Fragments of a Broken Mind ) a collection of his manuscripts, which constituted its own autobiography Hawkers, as they reached back to his first works.
Works
Hawkers hut
Hawkers Hut (English Hawker 's Hut ) is a torfgedeckter shack on the coast of Cornwall near Morwenstow, north of Higher Sharpnose Point. Hawker himself built the hut out of driftwood from sunken ships. He retired here to write poems and smoking opium, through the doorway Hawker could look across the sea to Lundy Iceland. Today the hut is the smallest structure that is under the protection of the National Trust.