William Falconer (poet)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Shipwreck, an epic poem written by William Falconer. The edition depicted above was printed in 1813 in Philadelphia, while the first edition was printed in 1762.

William Falconer (21 February 1732 – c. January 1770) was a Scottish epic poet concerned mainly with life at sea. He also compiled a dictionary of marine terms.

The Shipwreck[]

Falconer was the son of a barber in Edinburgh, where he was born, became a sailor, and was thus thoroughly competent to describe the management of the storm-tossed vessel, the career and fate of which are described in his poem, The Shipwreck (1762),[1] a work of genuine, though unequal, talent. The efforts which Falconer made to improve the poem in the subsequent edition which followed the first were not entirely successful.

The work gained for him the patronage of the Duke of York, through whose influence he obtained the position of purser on various warships. He had himself been one of three survivors of a trading ship on voyage from Alexandria to Venice. In 1751 he wrote and published a poem on the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales. He had also contributed poems to the Gentleman's Magazine. The poem The Shipwreck was dedicated to the then rear-admiral the Duke of York where the poem states:

From regions where Peruvian billows roar,
To the bleak coasts of savage Labrador.

Falconer was a midshipman on the Royal George for a short period of time and then in 1763 became purser of the frigate aboard which he wrote the political satire Demagogue. In 1767 he was purser of the Swiftsure.

In 1769 he published An Universal Dictionary of the Marine. Falconer was a passenger in the frigate Aurora when it was lost at sea en route to India, being last seen on 24 December 1769.

Subsequent use[]

Falconer's poems were used by Patrick O'Brian in his Aubrey-Maturin series. One of his lesser characters is a nautical poet but his poems are Falconer's.

The lines

With living colours give my verse to glow:
The sad memorial of a tale of woe!

(from The Shipwreck, Canto I) were used as a motto for Tafereel van de overwintering der Hollanders op Nova Zembla in de jaren 1596 en 1597 (1820) by the Dutch poet Hendrik Tollens (1780–1856).

References[]

  1. ^ Victorianweb.org

Sources[]

  • Gutenberg.org, The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair and Falconer in Library Edition of the British Poets edited by the Rev. George Gilfillan
  •  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.
  • "William Falconer' in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

External links[]

Stub icon

This article about a Scottish writer, poet or playwright is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by .

  • v
  • t
Retrieved from ""