Frances Cornford | Biography

Although Frances Cornford essentially remained a Georgian poet through a career that lasted half a century, she was sometimes associated with literary figures of the modernist generation and their successors. She was, after all, a contemporary of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)--the latter born in the same year, 1886. These poets were Americans who lived in London mainly to make poetry new (in Pound's famous phrase), whereas Frances Cornford was born and grew up in a brilliant intellectual milieu in Cambridge University. In their youth both she and Virginia Woolf were close friends of Rupert Brooke, a glamorous Cambridge poet who died in 1915, but Cornford and Woolf lived in different worlds. Their chief association seems to have been in the late 1920s, when Leonard and Virginia Woolf published Cornford's fourth volume of verse, Different Days (1928), through their Hogarth Press. Woolf knew...
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