Ralph Hodgson

[1] He kept up a copious correspondence with other poets and literary figures, especially Siegfried Sassoon, as well as people he met in his time in Japan, such as Professor Takeshi Saito.

[1] He eschewed a conventional education, and it was claimed he ran off to America as a teenager and worked in New York as a theatre designer, but there is no proof for this.

In 1912 he founded a small press, At the Sign of the Flying Fame, with the illustrator Claud Lovat Fraser (1890–1921) and the writer and journalist Holbrook Jackson (1874–1948).

In the immediate pre-War years he presided over a luncheon table at Eustace Miles vegetarian Café where he befriended Enid Bagnold.

Hodgson received the Edmond de Polignac Prize in 1914, for a musical setting of The Song of Honour, and was included in the Georgian Poetry anthologies.

Also in Japan, Hodgson worked, almost anonymously, as part of the committee that translated the great collection of Japanese classical poetry, the Man'yōshū, into English.

In 1938 Hodgson left Japan and, after visiting friends in the UK including Siegfried Sassoon (they had met in 1919), he finally settled permanently in a small farmhouse with Aurelia in Minerva, Ohio.

Living in Minerva, he continued working on his long poem The Muse and the Mastiff and, with the help of Seymour Adelman, set up a small publishing venture under the Flying Scroll imprint.