Theophilus Marzials (1850-1920)
Theophilus Marzials (1850-1920) was born in Belgium and educated in Switzerland. He spent most of his life working as a librarian in England, where he also composed music, translated opera librettos and wrote poetry. Christina Rossetti gave Marzials permission to set some of her poems to music. His song Twickenham Ferry was very popular in its time, in both England and America.
Marzials had long blond hair and a huge ego. He often declaimed publicly, without warning. Sometimes this was in the ultimate sanctuary of quietude, where he loudly pronounced: “Am I not the darling of the British Museum reading room?”
Found in his collection The Gallery of Pigeons and Other Poems, the above work – A Tragedy – undoubtedly reflects deep emotions within the poet. Ford Maddox Brown declaimed that Marzials’ verses were “by far the most exquisite that were produced by any of the lesser Pre-Raphaelite poets.” Yet A Tragedy has been recently been picked on in several works on poems and literature as “the worst poem in the English language”…
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