ART & LIFE

POSTCARD BIOGRAPHIES FROM THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

From the late 1920s, the National Portrait Gallery invited leading writers to create 70-word biographies, of subjects whose portraits hang in the Gallery, for the backs of postcards. In this 12-week series, we present some of the most exceptional and unexpected of these unknown literary gems

The lessons he learnt from France and Italy taught him in his poetical maturity to be wholly himself and English - English with that mellow, homeric Merry-Englishness which makes the later Canterbury Tales unique in our literature. He is the only English poet who ever loved earth for earth's sake, who ever unreservedly accepted this lovely, absurd, deplorable and adorable Universe. In all our literature he is the one true, pre-platonic pagan. A Huxley