Who was the Super Tramp poet

A. William Henry Davies became known as the Super-Tramp. He's worth knowing a little about, as he�had an unusual life for a poet - or an unusual life for a tramp, depending on how you look at it. Born in Newport, Wales, in 1871, he left school early and worked first as an apprentice to a picture framer then set out for a life on the road as a beggar, street singer and peddler in Britain and the USA. When in America he lost a foot while trying to hop a train heading for the gold-rush Klondike region of northern Canada.

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Q. What did he write
A. Back in England and living in London he issued his first volume of poetry, the self-published The Soul's Destroyer and Other Poems in 1905, which received favourable notices from George Bernard Shaw. Shaw then contributed a preface to Davies' next work a couple of years later, a prose piece entitled The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.

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He was a prolific poet, and his volumes included Nature Poems and Others, Forty New Poems, Poems 1930-31, The Loneliest Mountain and the posthumous Collected Poems of 1942. His work became very popular, dealing in the main with themes of nature and the hardships of the poor in a style uncharacteristically simplistic for the period. Despite his popularity, Davies remained shy of public attention. He died in 1940 in Gloucestershire.

Q. Was he alone in being a successful tramp-poet
A. No. There was Alexander Anderson (1845-1909), a railway worker turned poet, who called himself 'Surfaceman' and achieved some success at the turn of the 20th century. Better known today is a contemporary of Davies, the Irish poet and author Patrick MacGill.

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MacGill was born in Donegal in 1891 and from his teens worked the potato harvests in Scotland, going 'on the tramp' between jobs. His most celebrated work, Children of the Dead End (1914), is a fictionalised autobiographical account of his life on the road, and the crushingly hard lives of the Irish migrant workers in Scotland in the early years of the 20th century. Like Davies, MacGill's first published work was a volume of poetry, Gleanings from a Navvy's Scrapbook.

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From then on MacGill's life takes off in an incredible way. On the basis of a number of good reviews for his work and the success of earlier articles he had submitted, he was given a job at the Daily Express in London and then, improbably, worked as librarian at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. In the 1920s he moved to the USA, and after a chequered career that included writing a screenplay in Hollywood, some acting and a number of now forgotten novels, he died in Florida in 1963.

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By Simon Smith