KEIGHLEY Library will mark National Poetry Day on Thursday, October 6, with a talk, upstairs in the Local Studies Library, at 11am on Gordon Bottomley, Keighley’s Neglected Poet and Playwright.

Born in Henry Street in 1874, he attended the Keighley Trade and Grammar School where he gratefully remembered a Latin master who taught him to scan verse – “I would write his name up in letters of gold if I could,” he later remarked. Also, thanks to a theatre-going grandmother, he was “an experienced playgoer” by the age of six.

When in his late teens he was afflicted with a defective lung and haemorrhages, his family moved for the sake of his health, first to Grange-over-Sands then to Cartmel. He was married in 1905 and moved to Silverdale in 1914.

Despite being an invalid for much of his life, his work ranges from traditional lyrical verses, through the Georgian poetry movement of the earlier 20th century to experimental drama for performance in churches. As a lifelong letter-writer and friend of writers, artists and actors, he is often quoted in the biographies of his better-known contemporaries.

He died in 1948 and is commemorated by a little-noticed blue plaque at the Cavendish Street corner of North Queen Street.

This studio portrait, by G Wilson of Grange-over-Sands, shows Gordon Bottomley aged 22 in 1896, the year he published his first book of poems, The Mickle Drede and Other Verses.