Norman Gale

Norman Rowland Gale (4 March 1862 – 7 October 1942) was a poet, novelist and reviewer, who published many books over a period of nearly fifty years.

Gale was born in Kew, Surrey. He entered Exeter College, Oxford in 1880 and graduated in 1884. He was a teacher for some years, but in 1892 he began writing full-time. His poems "Betrothed" and "The Call" appeared in The Yellow Book. His best-known poem is probably "The Country Faith", which is in The Oxford Book of English Verse. In the United States, Louis Untermeyer included it in his anthology Modern British Poetry, and, with a change of title to "Life in the Country", it opened the second reader in Cora Wilson Stewart's series, Country Life Readers.

For the last two years of his life Gale lived in Headley Down, Hampshire, where he died at the age of eighty.

Publications A Country Muse, 1892; reprinted with additions as A Country Muse: First Series, 1894 A Country Muse: New Series, 1893; reprinted with additions as A Country Muse: Second Series, 1895 Orchard Songs, A June Romance [novel], 1894 Cricket Songs, 1894 All Expenses Paid, 1895 Songs for Little People, 1896 (ed.) Poems by John Clare, 1901 Barty's Star [novel], 1903 More Cricket Songs, 1905 A Book of Quatrains, 1909 Song in September, 1912 Solitude, 1913 Collected Poems, 1914 The Candid Cuckoo, 1918 A Merry-go-Round of Song, 1919 Verse in Bloom, 1925 A Flight of Fancies, 1926 Messrs Bat and Ball, 1930 Close of Play, 1936 Remembrances, 1937 Love-in-a-Mist, 1939