“What we have to consider is the brevity of life.” — Ralph Hodgson | V2Melody

“What we have to consider is the brevity of life.”

His reason for neglecting the farm and attending to wonder instead · Conversation, reported in Time magazine, 1958

About Ralph Hodgson

Ralph Hodgson

9 September 1871–3 November 1962

Ralph Hodgson was born on 9 September 1871 in Darlington, County Durham, and died on 3 November 1962 in Minerva, Ohio. His life traversed an astonishing stretch of history: the late Victorian industrial world, the upheaval of two world wars, the flowering and fragmentation of literary modernism, and the gradual…

More by Ralph Hodgson

Poems by Ralph Hodgson

More remarks by Ralph Hodgson

“The birds seemed just as interesting as in England, and I'd never seen a hummingbird. It took my mind.”

A new country justified by its birds rather than its convenience · Conversation on settling in Ohio, reported in Time magazine, 1958

“I must have been the most disappointed boy in England after I had stopped him with many apologies and put my question, for I got the answer: Twenty minutes past four, my lad. The old man was stone deaf.”

The childhood meeting that began a lifelong passion for fighting dogs · Recollection of first seeing a bull mastiff

“Some things have to be believed to be seen.”

Faith treated as the instrument that makes certain realities visible · Flying Scrolls, collected in The Skylark and Other Poems