Robert Nichols

Biography

Robert Nichols, a World War I poet, also wrote plays and short stories. Born at Shanklin in the Isles of Wight to John Boyer Buchanan Nichols and Catherine Louisa Pusey, Nichols himself said “that he owed most to his own unmethodical private reading”(Blunden). His father was an artist and author, likely contributing to his desire to read and write literature as well. While attending Winchester College and Trinity College at Oxford, World War I broke out and Nichols joined the Royal Field Artillery. Although his tour was short due to insomnia and other medical issues likely caused by his service, his poetry of the time would mark him as one of the war’s soldier poets.

Among his soldier friends Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, Nichols was much more idealistic and patriotic in his writing causing him to be regarded as another Rupert Brooke (Blunden). This idealism would continue with him after the war into the fantastic through “The Smile of the Sphinx” which was published in The London Mercury in 1920. He had a short lived tenure as the chair of English at Tokyo Imperial University. He would consider himself more of a writer of plays and would retire to move to hollywood and advise in the film making of Douglas Fairbanks Senior (Blunden). World War I had a tremendous impact on him and this would lead him to publishing the Anthology of War Poetry about the war poets of the previous war. Nichols was considered to be a good man by many and a romantic by some. A glimpse of this can be seen in writings like the “The Smile of the Sphinx”. The poet and playwright passed away in 1944 on December 17.