If he belonged anywhere, Hodgson was a Georgian, the pre-1914 school of poets later eclipsed by the modernist revolution of Pound and Eliot. Georgian poetry was often pastoral yet the best had also a new, earthier language and subject matter: a break with late Victorian formality or fin-de-siècle decadence. Although Hodgson persistently used ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, his style is bright and vigorous, never limp. He yearned strongly for a pre-industrial world of free people and wild animals, for torrents of birdsong in lost, overgrown meadows or deep forests.

After the first world war (in which he served on the home front) Hodgson taught at Sendai University in Japan, his first wife’s painful death having prompted one of his few poems of intimate sympathy, the haunting ‘Silver Wedding’. He had no children but married three times. His second wife left, loathing Japan; the third, a much younger American, looked after him devotedly until his death.

Although a declared patriot, Hodgson preferred to dream of England rather than to live there. He came back to London in 1938, detested the political and literary gloom and left for a remote village in Ohio. Although his admirers increasingly cherished his eccentricities as much as his writing, he was admired enough, aged 82, to get the Queen’s Medal for Poetry and to be helped financially by rich well-wishers.

Ralph Hodgson needs to be rediscovered. The difficulty for a biographer is that, behind the noise, he kept his life to himself; perhaps indolence or his puritanism — he did not drink and was anti-blood-sports — prevented self-revelation. Yet John Harding has set out delightfully what there is to know about this strange figure, catching his fresh innocence and truculent, mesmeric voice. Above all he has done what Hodgson would most have wanted: sent the reader back to the poetry.

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