Two Northumberland poets--Wilfrid Wilson Gibson--his early failures--his studies of low life--his collected poems--his short dramas of pastoral experiences--_Daily Bread_--lack of melody--uncanny imagination--whimsies--poems of the Great War--their contrast to conventional sentimental ditties--the accusation--his contribution to the advance of poetry.--Ralph Hodgson--his shyness--his slender output--his fastidious self-criticism--his quiet facing of the known facts in nature and in humanity--his love of books--his humour--his respect for wild and tame animals--the high percentage of artistic excellence in his work.--Lascelles Abercrombie. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson--a horrible mouthful--was born in Hexham, Northumberland, in 1878. Like Walt Whitman's, his early poetry was orthodox, well groomed, and uninteresting. It produced no effect on the public, but it produced upon its author a mental condition of acute discontent--the necessary conviction of sin preceding regeneration. Whether he could ever succeed in bringing his verse down to earth, he did not then know; but so far as he was concerned, he not only got down to earth, but got under it. He made subterranean expeditions with the miners, he followed his nose into slums, he talked long hours with the unclassed, and listened sympathetically to the lamentations of sea-made widows. His nature--extraordinarily delicate and sensitive--received deep wounds, the scars of which appeared in his subsequent poetry. Now he lives where John Masefield was born, and like him, speaks for the inarticulate poor.