By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?’ This couplet is the one truly enduring legacy of the poet and self-described ‘supertramp’, W. H. Davies (1871-1940). There was actually a fair bit more to William Henry Davies than these two lines, but there’s no doubt that they, and the poem ‘Leisure’ from which they come, is the most famous thing Davies wrote.