Margaret Cropper (1886–1980) was a
Westmorland
Westmorland (, formerly also spelt ''Westmoreland'';R. Wilkinson The British Isles, Sheet The British IslesVision of Britain/ref> is a historic county in North West England spanning the southern Lake District and the northern Dales. It had an ...
poet, author and hymnist, who rivalled
Norman Nicholson
Norman Cornthwaite Nicholson (8 January 1914 – 30 May 1987) was an English poet associated with the Cumbrian town of Millom. His poetry is noted for local concerns, straightforward language, and elements of common speech. Although known chief ...
as the leading 20th-century
Lake Poet
The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England, United Kingdom, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known. They ...
.
Life and writings
The fourth of five children, Margaret Cropper was born into a long-established Quaker family of
Burneside, near
Kendal, where she would live for the majority of her life.
Her first book of poems – ''Poems'' – was published by
Elkin Mathews
Charles Elkin Mathews (1851 – 10 November 1921) was a British publisher and bookseller who played an important role in the literary life of London in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Mathews was born in Gravesend, and learned his tr ...
in 1914, and was followed between the wars by further collections of short poems, mainly concerned with local people and the Lakeland landscape. She also wrote two longer poems in the 1930s, ''Little Mary Crosbie'' and ''The End of the Road'', which charted the life of the Westmoreland poor, and did so in a standard English that conveyed the full sense of the local dialect as well.
Norman Nicholson would later single her out for her exceptional ability to capture the Cumbrian vernacular, without resorting (as did others) to phonetic spelling or similar expedients. Some of the products of her work were included by
Robert Wilson Lynd in his 1939 ''Anthology of Modern Poetry'', while
G. M. Trevelyan
George Macaulay Trevelyan (16 February 1876 – 21 July 1962) was a British historian and academic. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1898 to 1903. He then spent more than twenty years as a full-time author. He returned to the ...
praised her poem ''The Broken Hearthstone'' especially for its ability to capture the personality of a mountain.
In the post-war years, she turned largely to prose-writing, with her biography of her friend,
Evelyn Underhill
Evelyn Underhill (6 December 1875 – 15 June 1941) was an English Anglo-Catholic writer and pacifist known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism. Her best-known is ''Mysticism'', published ...
, ''The Life of Evelyn Underhill'' (1958), and her study of 19th-century Anglicanism, ''Flame Touches Flame'' (London, 1949). She is also known for her hymns and religious plays.
The Wordsworths
Cropper's poem on
Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth (25 December 1771 – 25 January 1855) was an English author, poet, and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close all their adult lives. Dorothy Wordsworth had no a ...
says:
[Quoted in N. Nicolson, ''The Lake District'' (Penguin 1978) pg. 235]
See also
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cropper, Margaret
1886 births
1980 deaths
English women poets
20th-century English poets
Women religious writers
20th-century English women writers
People from Westmorland