Life
He was brought up in Norwich, and studied at University College, London and Magdalen College, Oxford. He had a position at University College from 1906, and was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford from 1909 to 1916.
From 1914 he was an official in Masterman's Wellington House Propaganda Department, which may explain his failiure to produce much poetry concerned with the War. He also worked as a journalist on the Daily Herald as one of Lansbury's Lambs — the group of idealistic young men helping with it after George Lansbury purchased it in 1913, and which included Douglas Cole, W. N. Ewer, Harold Laski, William Mellor and Francis Meynell.
It was probably Gould who brought Siegfried Sassoon to the paper as literary Editor after its relaunch in 1919. Gould regularly contributed poetry to the Herald and gave several sonnets to Millicent Fawcett's Common Cause when it became the Woman's Leader in 1920.
Gould also reviewed novels for the New Statesman, moving to The Observer as fiction editor in 1920. He was also (not coincidentally) made chief reader for Victor Gollancz Ltd., where he was involved in the early publication history of George Orwell.
His poem Wander-thirst is often quoted. Much of his poetry remains buried in the columns of newspapers and periodicals. The few collections that appeared, although well reviewed by contemporaries, are long out of print.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn’t matter so much as it seemed to do—it’s not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn’t matter so much.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)