Norman Gale

For the Wales international rugby union player, see Norman Gale (rugby union).

Norman Rowland Gale (4 March 1862 – 7 October 1942) was a poet, novelist and reviewer, who published many books over a period of nearly fifty years.^[1]

Gale was born in Kew, Surrey. He entered Exeter College, Oxford in 1880 and graduated in 1884.^[2] He was a teacher for some years, but in 1892 he began writing full-time.^[3] His poems "Betrothed" and "The Call" appeared in The Yellow Book.^[4][5] His best-known poem is probably "The Country Faith",^[6] which is in The Oxford Book of English Verse. In the United States, Louis Untermeyer included it in his anthology Modern British Poetry, and, with a change of title to "Life in the Country", it opened the second reader in Cora Wilson Stewart's series, Country Life Readers.^[7]

For the last two years of his life Gale lived in Headley Down, Hampshire, where he died at the age of eighty.^[8]

Publications

• A Country Muse, 1892; reprinted with additions as A Country Muse: First Series, 1894
• A Country Muse: New Series, 1893; reprinted with additions as A Country Muse: Second Series, 1895
• Orchard Songs, [1893]
• A June Romance [novel], 1894
• Cricket Songs, 1894
• All Expenses Paid, 1895
• Songs for Little People, 1896
• (ed.) Poems by John Clare, 1901
• Barty's Star [novel], 1903
• More Cricket Songs, 1905
• A Book of Quatrains, 1909
• Song in September, 1912
• Solitude, 1913
• Collected Poems, 1914
• The Candid Cuckoo, 1918
• A Merry-go-Round of Song, 1919
• Verse in Bloom, 1925
• A Flight of Fancies, 1926
• Messrs Bat and Ball, 1930
• Close of Play, 1936
• Remembrances, 1937
• Love-in-a-Mist, 1939