By the time of his death in 1931, Arnold Bennett was a renowned and highly respected author with a prodigious literary output. The variety of subject matter covered by him was immense. He wrote novels, short stories, stage-plays, literary reviews, self-improvement manuals, film scripts, forewords to other authors' books, newspaper columns, his own daily journal, letters to all and sundry, and finally, poetry.Although Bennett produced some of the finest pieces of written English prose
of the last 150 years, with such majestic works as
Clayhanger and
The Old Wives' Tale, his poetic abilities did not receive critical acclaim. Despite requests from Bennett to publishers no collection of his poetry has ever been published, this collection draws on the work of Paul Plant in his dissertation 'A Poetry of the Ordinary' and includes all the poems that can be located together with examples of Bennett's original hand written drafts.
