W. R. Rodgers was one of only two Irish poets of his generation who enjoyed a substantial British and American reputation, the other being Louis MacNeice, a fellow Ulsterman. In the 1940s and 1950s Rodgers worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation in London and was a friend of MacNeice and also of Dylan Thomas, whose poetry Rodgers's occasionally resembles. Rodgers has suffered a sharper decline in reputation than his two friends, but, because of a few remarkable poems and a historical importance as a post-1930s romantic, he continues, and rightly, to find representation in anthologies of twentieth-century British and Irish verse.

The son of Robert Rodgers, who worked for an insurance company, and Jane McCarey Rodgers, William Robert Rodgers was born in Belfast into an Ulster Presbyterian (or Scots-Irish) family and had the puritan upbringing then widespread in the North of Ireland. His parents were, as the...