author
William Crowe
1745–1829
An Oxford public orator, clergyman, and poet, he is best remembered for the descriptive poem Lewesdon Hill. His life carried him from a carpenter’s household in Berkshire to the literary and academic circles of late Georgian England.
1 Audiobook
Lewesdon Hill, with other poems
by William Crowe
About the author
Born in 1745 and baptized at Midgham, Berkshire, William Crowe was the son of a carpenter and spent much of his childhood in Winchester. He was educated at Winchester College and then at New College, Oxford, where he built a long academic career and eventually became public orator of the university.
Crowe was both a Church of England clergyman and a man of letters. He held parish livings including Stoke Abbas in Dorset and later Alton Barnes in Wiltshire, while also writing poetry and literary criticism. His best-known work is Lewesdon Hill (1789), a reflective landscape poem admired by later readers for its graceful, descriptive style.
In his later years he continued to be active in literary life, lectured on poetry, and published works including a treatise on English versification and an edition of William Collins's poems. He died at Bath in 1829, leaving behind the reputation of a learned and cultivated figure whose writing links the Augustan world with the early Romantic period.