John Drinkwater

              LEE KEEDICK PRESENTS
JOHN DRINKWATER England's Brilliant Dnet, Dramatist and Essayist
Author of ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Stirring Uplifting Inspiring


Figure


Reads from his Own Verse

LECTURE SUBJECT:

Exclusive Management, LEE KEEDICK, 437 Fifth Avenue, New York City



MR. JOHN DRINKWATER has become widely known in this country by reason of his remarkable play, Abraham Lincoln, in which he has given a heart-gripping picture of the distinctive personality and sublime leadership of the great President.  After being presented in London for over a year, Mr. Drinkwater's play was produced in New York in November, 1919, when it met with overwhelming success.

Having supervised this New York production, Mr. Drinkwater made a brief tour last season, in the course of which he delivered his stirring lecture, An English Dramatist's View of Lincoln, and also spoke on poetry, drama and general literature.  Among the notable gatherings that he addressed were those which greeted him at Springfield, Ill., the home of Lincoln, and at Yale, Harvard and other universities.  Wherever he appeared he aroused intense enthusiasm by the directness and beauty of his utterances, and before his return to England he had firmly established his reputation as a brilliant lecturer.  Throughout his visit to this country he was acclaimed by the most notable men and women, while the press awarded him unstinted praise for his splendid work as poet and dramatist.

Although he is still in the thirties, Mr. Drinkwater holds a foremost position among English dramatists, and is also a leader of the younger generation of English poets.  A genius of rare versatility and unusual breadth of scholarship, he has written twelve volumes of poems, plays and critical essays that have won a high place in modern literature.

In addition to being a poet, essayist and dramatist, Mr. Drinkwater is a highly capable actor, having managed the Birmingham Repertory Theatre—one of the most important play-houses in England—for several years.  While he is naturally a brilliant speaker, his stage experience gives a distinct charm to his lectures and readings of his own verse.  All who have heard him speak have been impressed by his wonderful sincerity, forcefulness and ability to sway a large audience.

Mr. Drinkwater has arranged to return to this country during the coming season for another brief lecture tour, when his reception is certain to be most cordial.



Lecture Subjects:

AN ENGLISH DRAMATIST'S VIEW OF LINCOLN
THE NATURE OF DRAMA
POETRY AND LIFE
THE POET AND TRADITION
(with reading of poems)
PAPER ON RUPERT BROOKE




John Drinkwater's Supreme Benius as Pnet, Dramatist and Lecturer, Arrlaimed by the Press of Two Countries

AN IDEAL LECTURER

John Drinkwater, the English poet and dramatist, faced a large audience at Carnegie Hall, yesterday morning, when he lectured on 'An English Dramatist's View of Lincoln,' and explained why he and the British public had found in Abraham Lincoln unusual dramatic material and intense emotional interest.  As a lecturer Mr. Drinkwater proved to be entertaining and impressive, and it must also be remarked that he is of the almost perfect lecture-hero type.  He is dark; he is tall; he is at once poetic and virilely handsome, and if he intones his pronunciation about Lincoln with befitting dignity, he lightens his lecture now and then with an apt reference to less profound topics.  The result is that his audience is elevated but never strained beyond its grasp.—
New York Sun.



POET IN SPEECH, GESTURE, AND BEARING

It is gratifying to have Mr. Drinkwater measure up in gesture and bearing to one's conception of a poet.  There is a compelling quality about his speech which falls into cadence in a most delightful manner.  He has a considerable volume of accomplishment in both poetry and criticism besides his dramatic work.—
New York Evening Post.



AN INTERNATIONAL FIGURE

In writing a great play, with Abraham Lincoln as its dominant character, Mr. Drinkwater has beaten our dramatists at their own game.  He has also produced a moving bit of art, and the audiences attest it.  Mr. Drinkwater, moreover, is famous as a poet.  His books have been published outside of his own country, and that is essential in order for a poet to be an international figure.—
New York Evening Sun.



HAS RAINBOW IMAGINATION

Mr. Drinkwater, the English poet, is a fine upstanding fellow with a rainbow imagination, and a heart big enough to measure the significance of a Lincoln to humanity and the world of letters and drama.  May his success be as wide as our welcome is warm.—
New York Evening Telegram.



STRAIGHTFORWARD AND SINCERE

John Drinkwater had no need to use any self-devised system of phonetics to express himself to the large audience that attended his lecture at Carnegie Hall.  Mr. Drinkwater's talk on 'Abraham Lincoln,' who, he says, has been the common ideal of democracy, shared alike by the Americans and the English, was most straight-forward, sincere and to the point.—
New York Telegram.



TYPICAL MAN OF LETTERS

Mr. Drinkwater is typical of the contemporary man of letters and belongs to the group of English poets who have always been as much interested in drama as in poetry, and have worked for its successful production.  He combines the qualities of the artist with the purposeful determination of the man who knows what he wants, which with a poet consists in expression and the pursuit of his craft.—
Baltimore American.



MANNER EXCEEDINGLY ATTRACTIVE

An exceedingly attractive mannered man is John Drinkwater, tall, slender, but broad of shoulder, with youthful gray eyes, and dark hair touched with gray at the temples.  Before his play, 'Abraham Lincoln,' brought him into prominence he was widely known as a poet, critic and essayist.  Now, well under forty, he has before him a most promising career as a dramatist.  His 'Lincoln' still remains the sensation of the English and American stages, and guarantees its author a cordial audience wherever he appears.—
Philadelphia Press.



REMARKABLE PERSONALITY, WONDERFUL LECTURER

The most remarkable thing about John Drinkwater the poet is John Drinkwater the man.  His genuineness is so patent, his sympathies so markedly sincere, and his manner so simple and direct that however true was what he had to say, and however delightful were the poems he read, it was the man himself, behind and in it all, that so quickly won the splendid appreciation of the large audience which greeted him yesterday.  This is not to say that his poetry is not true and beautiful.  It is beauty's self.  But it is a way of emphasizing the veritable
 magic with which he can atmosphere his poems by the charm and feeling with which he reads them.—
Illinois State Journal.



LECTURE A DISTINCT SUCCESS

As a lecturer Mr. Drinkwater was a distinct success.  In his talk on Abraham Lincoln his remarkably clear enunciation, and his comparative freedom from English mannerisms in speech rather surprised his hearers, who were accustomed to a much broader accent and more words varying in pronunciation from their own.  In the course of his lecture Mr. Drinkwater read the opening chorus of his play, 'Abraham Lincoln,' and also the final chorus, both in pleasing verse.  He then read with dramatic effect a number of poems all of a wonderfully musical character, perfect in rhyme and rhythm, and the most of them of delicate poetic sentiment.  The attendance at the lecture was large.—
Indianapolis Star.



OF UNIVERSAL INTEREST

Too many of our poets to-day seem to write for each other and not for readers at large.  Mr. John Drinkwater is different.  His themes are homely and of universal interest, and he pays his readers the compliment of never writing unless he has something to say.  He does not say it at too great length either; his thoughts are compacted, and his verse thereby gains greatly in vigor and distinction.—
London Daily Mail.



NOBLE VISION, FINE PERSONALITY

Of all modern poets Mr. Drinkwater is memorable for level beauty of achievement.  His poems have a varied charm that delights and holds us.  There floods his work a philosophy built not out of passion or mystery, but out of a clear and noble vision.—
Saturday Review.



POETRY OF GOOD FELLOWSHIP

There is something characteristically English about Mr. John Drinkwater's poetry.  It is honest, sincere, ambitious, vigorous-minded, essentially amiable; the poetry of good fellowship, with constant friendship, of whole-hearted love for English natural beauty, of patriotism which is none the less deep because it is discriminating.  His poems are completely adequate, and they have the finality of anything well said.—
London Daily News.



STRIKES A NEW NOTE

Mr. Drinkwater's verse is distinguished by freshness and virility.  Whether his theme be love or war, achievement or failure, death or the beauty of the English shires, especially his beloved counties of Warwick and Worcester, he always strikes some new note that arrests attention.  His war songs were among the best that the conflict of nations inspired, and one of them, 'The Gathering Song,' had a marching lilt and fervor of patriotism worthy of Kipling at his best.—
Pall Mall Gazette.



HIGH ARTISTIC IDEAL

Among living poets Mr. John Drinkwater remains most interesting and impressive by the quality of his poetic speech and his gift of speaking.  He has a high artistic ideal which he serves with unswerving fidelity, and he is a keen lover of those high adventures and profound experiences by which the human spirit arrives at self-realization and liberty.  He can feel with the race, whether that term be used to mean his fellow-citizens or humanity in general.  But when all is said, he still remains most interesting and most impressive by the quality of his poetic speech.—
Birmingham (England) Daily Post.



GOODNESS, TRUTH AND BEAUTY

No one living has turned out a greater body of consistently fine work than Mr. Drinkwater.  There is hardly a poetic quality that can be denied to him.  Goodness, truth and beauty unite in the burden of his songs.  Nor does his verse lack passion.  From it grows the flower of many true and delicate lovelinesses.—
The New Witness (London).




BOOKS BY JOHN DRINKWATER

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Surely one of the finest plays of our time.—
N. Y. Sun.  Now in its forty-fifth thousand.   $1.25 net.



POEMS, 1908–1919

These poems show the same vision, the same power of simplicity that characterize 'Abraham Lincoln'.—
Boston Herald.   $2.00 net.




TO BE PUBLISHED IN THE FALL

LINCOLN, THE WORLD EMANCIPATOR
An illuminating study of Lincoln as the supreme embodiment of the best qualities and ideals of the Anglo-Saxon race.



PAWNS
Mr. Drinkwater's brilliant talents as a dramatist have never found a more effective expression than in these four one-act plays.  The themes range from the peasant play of the Storm to the classic setting found in X-O: A Night of the Trojan War.




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