Robert Sterling's career at Oxford was cut short after two years by the outbreak of war. But these two years had sufficed to create an impression of him which will endure. As a poet he was known only to a few till after his Newdigate Poem had been written. One evening, at the urgency of friends, he read this poem to them, and what they now discovered in its author they felt to be the corollary of what they had seen before. Doubtless they understood him better through it, and found therein a new interpretation of him; but because it was so true an expression of himself, they realized that their experience of him was the best interpretation of his poetry.
For this reason more than any other, it may be valuable to say something however brief about his life; and to attempt, imperfectly enough, to communicate the impression, itself fragmentary, which he left upon those who had begun to know and love him.
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