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Thomas Gordon Hake

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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THOMAS GORDON HAKE (1809-1895), English poet, was born at Leeds, of an old Devonshire family, on the 10th of March 1809. His mother was a Gordon of the Huntly branch. He studied medicine at St George's hospital and at Edinburgh and Glasgow, but had given up practice for many years before his death, and had devoted himself to a literary life. In 1839 he published a prose epic Vates, republished in Ainsworth's magazine as Valdarno, which attracted the attention of D. G. Rossetti. In after years he became an intimate member of the circle of friends and followers gathered round Rossetti, who so far departed from his usual custom as to review Hake's poems in the Academy and in the Fortnightly Review. In 1871 he published Madeline; 1872, Parables and Tales; 1883, The Serpent Play; 1890, New Day Sonnets; and in 1892 his Memoirs of Eighty Years. Dr Hake's works had much subtlety and felicity of expression, and were warmly appreciated in a somewhat restricted literary circle. In his last published verse, the sonnets, he shows an advance in facility on the occasional harshness of his earlier work. He was given a Civil List literary pension in 1893, and died on the 11th of January 1895.