Watts-Dunton, THEODORE (the name Dunton, his mother's, he assumed in 1896), poet and critic, was born in 1836 at St Ives in Huntingdonshire. His father, according to Norris's History of St Ives, was a solicitor and a naturalist, intimately connected with Murchison, Lyell, and other geologists, a pre-Darwinian evolutionist of considerable mark in the scientific world of London, and the Gilbert White of the Ouse valley. He received at Cambridge a somewhat elaborate private education, comprising music, art, and the physical sciences, especially biology. Settling in London, he soon became the centre of a very remarkable literary and artistic company. He is described in the introduction to Philip Bourke Marston's collected works, by Mrs Chandler Moulton, the editor, as 'a poet whose noble work won for him the life-long and intimate friendship of Rossetti and Browning and Lord Tennyson, and was the first link in that chain of more than brotherly love which binds him to Swinburne, his house-mate at present and for many years past.' He thus came to exercise a most important influence on the art and culture of the day; but although he has written enough to fill many volumes—in the Examiner, the Athenæum (since 1876), the Nineteenth Century, the Fortnightly Review, &c.—he has let year after year go by without his collecting his essays, which, always dealing with first principles, have ceased to be really anonymous, and are quoted by the press both in England and in Germany as his. But, having wrapped up his talents in a weekly review, he was only ephemerally known to the general public, except for the sonnets and other poems that from the Athenæum, &c., had found their way into anthologies, and for the half-dozen articles on poetic subjects that he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica and the present work. The poems of which are most generally known are 'The Burden of the Armada' and 'The Ode to Mother Carey's Chicken,' the latter of which has been often reprinted in England and America. The chief note of his poetry—much of it written in youth—is its individuality, the sources of its inspiration Nature and himself. His prose essays—literary mainly, but ranging also over folklore, ethnology, science generally—are marked as much by their independence and originality as by their suggestiveness, harmony, incisive vigour, and depth and breadth of insight. They have made him a force in literature to which only Sainte-Beuve, not Jeffrey, is a parallel. Mr Swinburne has styled him 'the first critic of our time—perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age,' and Rossetti in a published conversation said the same thing. In 1898 he published The Coming of Love, his first volume of collected poems, and in 1899 made a great hit with the Gypsy romance of Aylwin.
See, besides works cited at Rossetti, W. Sharp's Sonnets of the Century (1887), preface to The New Day of Dr Hake (1890), and A. Miles's Poets of the Century (1892).