William Falconer (poet)
William Falconer (21 February 1732 – c. January 1770) was a Scottish epic poet concerned mainly with life at sea. He also compiled a dictionary of maritime terms.
Life
Falconer was the son of a barber in Edinburgh, where he was born. He became a sailor, and thereby competent to describe the management of a storm-tossed vessel, whose career and fate are told in his poem, The Shipwreck (1762),[1] a work of genuine, if unequal talent. The efforts Falconer made to improve the poem in a later edition were not wholly successful.
The work won him the patronage of the Duke of York, through whose influence he was appointed purser on various warships. He had himself been one of three survivors of a trading ship on a voyage from Alexandria to Venice.
In 1751 Falconer produced a poem on the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales. He had also contributed poems to the Gentleman's Magazine. The Shipwreck was dedicated to the then rear-admiral the Duke of York.
Falconer was briefly a midshipman on the Royal George, then in 1763 he became purser of the frigate Glory, aboard which he wrote the political satire Demagogue. In 1767 he was purser of the Swiftsure. In 1769 he published An Universal Dictionary of the Marine.
William Falconer was a passenger in the frigate Aurora when it was lost at sea on a voyage to India.[2] He was last seen on 24 December 1769.
Later borrowings
Falconer's poems were used by Patrick O'Brian in his Aubrey-Maturin series. One of his lesser characters is a nautical poet, but his poems are Falconer's.
The lines "With living colours give my verse to glow:/The sad memorial of a tale of woe!", from The Shipwreck, Canto I, appeared as a motto for Tafereel van de overwintering der Hollanders op Nova Zembla in de jaren 1596 en 1597 (1820), by the Dutch poet Hendrik Tollens (1780–1856).
See also
- List of 18th-century British working-class writers
- List of people who disappeared mysteriously at sea
References
- ^ Victorianweb.org
- ^ van den Boogaerde, Pierre (2011), Shipwrecks of Madagascar, Strategic Book Publishing, pp. 96–97, ISBN 9781612043395
Sources
- Gutenberg.org, The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair and Falconer in Library Edition of the British Poets edited by the Rev. George Gilfillan
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.
- "William Falconer' in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
External links
- Quotations related to William Falconer (poet) at Wikiquote
- Works related to William Falconer at Wikisource
- William Falconer at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA)
- Biography
- William Falconer's Dictionary of the Marine (National Library of Australia)
- Works by William Falconer at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about William Falconer at Internet Archive
- Works by William Falconer at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Articles with short description
- Short description is different from Wikidata
- Use British English from October 2021
- Use dmy dates from March 2022
- Wikipedia articles incorporating text from A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature
- Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from SBDEL with no article parameter
- Commons category link from Wikidata
- Articles with Project Gutenberg links
- Articles with Internet Archive links
- Articles with LibriVox links
- Articles with FAST identifiers
- Articles with ISNI identifiers
- Articles with VIAF identifiers
- Articles with BNF identifiers
- Articles with BNFdata identifiers
- Articles with GND identifiers
- Articles with ICCU identifiers
- Articles with J9U identifiers
- Articles with KBR identifiers
- Articles with LCCN identifiers
- Articles with NKC identifiers
- Articles with NLA identifiers
- Articles with NLG identifiers
- Articles with NTA identifiers
- Articles with PLWABN identifiers
- Articles with VcBA identifiers
- Articles with TePapa identifiers
- Articles with DTBIO identifiers
- Articles with Trove identifiers
- Articles with SNAC-ID identifiers
- Articles with SUDOC identifiers
- 1732 births
- 1760s missing person cases
- 1769 deaths
- Maritime writers
- People lost at sea
- Scottish poets
- 18th-century Scottish poets
- Shipwreck survivors
- Royal Navy officers
- Writers from Edinburgh
- All stub articles
- Scottish writer stubs