Born to Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes on

September 16, 1880, Alfred Noyes grew up in

Wolverhampton, England. His father, a grocer and
a teacher, taught Noyes Latin and Greek. Noyes
attended Exeter College, Oxford, but left before he
earned a degree. At the age of twenty-one he
published his first collection of poems, The Loom
Years (1902), which received praise from respected poets such as
William Butler Yeats and George Meredith.

Between 1903 and 1908, Noyes published five volumes of poetry

including The Forest of Wild Thyme (1905) and The Flower of Old
Japan and Other Poems (1907). In his early work, Noyes claimed he
was seeking to follow the careless and happy feet of children back
into the kingdom of those dreams which...are the sole reality worth
living and dying for; those beautiful dreams, or those fantastic jests.
His books were widely reviewed and were published both in Britain
and the United States. Among his best-known poems from this time
are The Highwayman and Drake. Drake," which appeared
serially in Blackwoods Magazine, was a two-hundred-page epic
about life at sea. Both in style and subject, the poem shows a clear
influence of Romantic poets such as Tennyson and Wordsworth.

In 1907, Noyes married Garnett Daniels. They had three children.

His increasing popularity allowed the family to live off royalty
checks. In 1914, Noyes accepted a teaching position at Princeton
University, where he taught English Literature until 1923. He was a
noted critic of modernist writers, particularly James Joyce. Likewise,
his work at this time was criticized by some for its refusal to embrace
the modernist movement.

In 1922 he began an epic called The Torch Bearers, which was

published in three volumes (Watchers of the Sky, 1922; The Book
of Earth, 1925; and The Last Voyage, 1930). The book arose out of
his visit to a telescope located at Mount Wilson, California and
attempted to reconcile his views of science with religion. His wife
died in 1926 and Noyes turned increasingly to Catholicism and
religious themes in his later books, particularly The Unknown God
(1934) and If Judgment Comes (1941). During the World War II,
Noyes lived in Canada and America and was a strong advocate of
the Allied effort. In 1949, he returned to Britain. As a result of
increasing blindness, Noyes dictated all of his subsequent work. His
autobiography, Two Worlds for Memory, was published in 1953.
Alfred Noyes died on June 25, 1958, and was buried on Isle of
Wight.