Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (27 July 1870 – 16 July 1953) was a French born writer who became a naturalised British subject in 1902. He was one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. Recent biographies of Belloc have been written by A. N. Wilson and Joseph Pearce. Belloc was born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud France (next to Versailles and near Paris) to a French father and English mother, and grew up in England. His mother Elizabeth Rayner Parkes (1829-1925) was also a writer, and a great-grand-daughter of the English chemist Joseph Priestley. She married attorney Louis Belloc in 1867. In 1872, five years after they wed, Louis died, but not before being wiped out financially in a stock market crash. The young widow then brought her son Hilaire, along with his sister, Marie, back to England where he remained, except for his voluntary enlistment as a young man in the French artillery. After being educated at John Henry Cardinal Newman's Oratory School Belloc served his term of military service, as a French citizen, with an artillery regiment near Toul in 1891. He was powerfully built, with great stamina, and walked extensively in Britain and Europe. While courting his future wife Elodie, whom he first met in 1890, the impecunious Belloc walked a good part of the way from the midwest of the United States to her home in northern California, paying for lodging at remote farm houses and ranches by sketching the owners and reciting poetry.
october
Look, how those steep woods on the mountain's face
Burn, burn against the sunset; now the cold...[read poem]
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Burn, burn against the sunset; now the cold...
the hippopotamus
I shoot the Hippopotamus
With bullets made of platinum,
Because if I use leaden ones...[read poem]
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With bullets made of platinum,
Because if I use leaden ones...
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