Title: Wilfrid Wilson Gibson Collection (VMF059)
Administrative/Biographical History
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (October 2, 1878 –May 26, 1962) was a British poet. Gibson was born in Hexham, Northumberland and left the north for London in 1914 after his mother died. He had been publishing poems in magazines since 1895, and the collections Stonefolds, On The Threshold, were published by the Wayland publishers in 1914, and followed by The Web of Life in 1908.
Despite his residence in London and later on in Gloucestershire, many of Gibson's poems have Northumberland settings: Hexham's Market Cross, Hareshaw, and The Kielder Stone. Others deal with poverty and passion amid wild Northumbrian landscapes. Still others are devoted to fishermen, industrial workers and miners, often alluding to local ballads and the rich folk-song heritage of the North East. Also, during the early part of his writing life, Gibson wrote poems that featured the "macabre," such as Flannan Isle.
It was in London that he met both Edward Marsh and Rupert Brooke, becoming a close friend and later Brooke's literary executor (with Lascelles Abercrombie and Walter de la Mare). This was at the period when the first Georgian Poetry anthology was being hatched and Gibson was one of the insiders. Also, Gibson was one of the founders of the so-called “Dymock Poets,” a community of writers who settled briefly, before the outbreak of the World War I, in the village of Dymock, in north Gloucestershire.
