Thomas Gordon Hake Biography

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Thomas Gordon Hake

Thomas Gordon Hake is remembered more for his associations with other writers than for his own creative work, though his poetry was admired by W. M. and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other contemporary writers. He became a valued friend of the Rossettis, Theodore Watts-Dunton, and George Borrow.

Hake was born at Leeds on 10 March 1809. His father died when Hake was three. At the age of seven he was admitted to Christ's Hospital in London, a school for poor children. He studied medicine in London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow and graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1831. While engaged in these studies, Hake developed an interest in poetry; a collection of his poems entitled Poetic Lucubrations: Containing The Misanthrope and Other Effusions was published in 1828. The volume achieved no notice, and no more of Hake's poetry was published for some time.

During 1831-1832, Hake traveled on the Continent to improve his knowledge of foreign languages and to visit the medical schools of Florence and Paris. Upon his return to England he settled in Brighton to practice as a physician. Five years later he visited Paris, mainly to study anatomy. For a short time after returning to England he took up residence in London, but moved to Bury St. Edmunds in 1839 and became a physician at the County Hospital of Suffolk. Hake became acquainted with the novelist and translator George Borrow at Bury St. Edmunds, and they remained friends thereafter. During this time, Hake did not neglect his creative talent. The Piromides, a tragedy based on the mysteries of the Egyptian goddess Isis and her priesthood, was published in 1839. Part of a romance entitled Vates; or, The Philosophy of Madness appeared in 1840; the entire work was serialized in ten installments in Ainsworth's magazine as "Valdarno; or, The Ordeal of Art-Worship" from January to October 1850. The story recounts the hectic adventures of a tragedian who gives himself up to sinful and criminal experiences as a means of supplying himself with subjects for his art. Two other narratives followed in the same magazine, constituting a loose trilogy. After a visit to Canada and the United States, Hake became a physician at the West London Hospital, a position he held for five years. Hake was professionally active in medicine, writing many scientific articles for medical journals as well as monographs such as A Treatise on Varicose Capillaries (1839) and On Vital Force (1867).

Hake was inspired to resume the writing of poetry by the lovely woods he enjoyed on visits to the estate of his friend and patient Lady Ripon. In 1866 The World's Epitaph was published, and attracted the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti especially admired the poem "Old Souls," which, through its story of Christ's assuming the role of a lowly tinker to travel through the world mending souls like old pots and pans, criticizes religious sects as well as the fashionable churchgoers who, according to Hake, had put the idea of the poem into his mind. Rossetti and Hake met in 1869.

In 1868, Hake contributed a novel of character called "Her Winning Ways" to the New Monthly magazine, a small literary journal; thereafter he dedicated himself to poetry. Encouraged by Rossetti, he brought out Madeline, with Other Poems and Parables (1871), which reproduced much of The World's Epitaph, adding the long and difficult title poem in which Hake conducts his character through sleep, dreams, sleepwalking, sleep-talking, and the mesmeric state, all of which were subjects of his professional medical interest. Rossetti favorably reviewed this collection as well as Parables and Tales, which appeared the next year.

About this time, Hake settled in St. John's Wood in London to devote himself to his poetry, which improved steadily. He spent a good part of his time traveling in Italy and Germany. In June 1872 Hake took Rossetti, who was suffering from depression and the effects of drugs, into his home. Hake's son George acted as Rossetti's companion and secretary for some time afterward. (In his memoirs, Hake never mentions his marriage or his wife, and scarcely ever refers to his children. He seems to have had at least four sons and two daughters.)

A new collection of his poems was published every few years for the next decade; among these, New Symbols (1876) and Maiden Ecstasy (1880) are considered his best. In 1890 The New Day, a collection of sonnets, some of them inspired by his friendships with Rossetti and Borrow, was published. Hake was by now an old man, yet his creative powers did not flag. In fact, much of his finest poetry was written in his later years. An example is the opening of "The Birth of Venus" from New Symbols:

The waters of the warm, surf-laden sea,


   Couched 'neath a heaven of love that o'er them bends,


Lie trance-bound in a dream of ecstasy,


   Prophetic of a rapture that impends.


 


Now they swell up as if love's underflow


   Lifted their bosom, the sun's shredded fires,


Glinting each tremor now, with pulses low


   They lapse into a deluge of desires.

An abiding theme of Hake's poetry is the spiritual quest that must discover its purpose through a proper understanding of nature. Though always interested in the mysteries of nature, as he matured Hake became more mystical in his treatment of man's relationship to the natural world. His subjects ranged from Wordsworthian pastorals to the horrors of slum life. Many of his poems are psychological portraits dealing with historical, legendary, and fictional characters. Hake favored narrative poetry but strove for a lyrical or musical quality in all of his verse. For Rossetti, Hake's poems manifested a combination of homeliness and formality. In a different vein, Arthur Symons called Hake's "a new kind of poetry, in which science becomes an instrument in the creation of a new, curious kind of beauty, the poetry, one might almost say, of pathology."

In 1892 Hake's Memoirs of Eighty Years was published. The book concludes with the assertion that all is for the best in this world, where evil can ultimately do nothing but generate more good. For the last four years of his life, he was confined to his couch after fracturing his hip. He died on 11 January 1895.

Although Hake was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, his poetry is considerably different from theirs, though it shares their strong interest in nature. His poetry belongs to no school, but exhibits what his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton described as "the renascence of wonder" in English poetry. Though his poetry reveals a keen sensibility and moral intelligence, it is not memorable enough to secure Hake a firm place in the history of English poetry.