Emile Cammaerts

Emile Cammaerts (1878-1953) was a Belgian poet and essayist who moved to England in 1908 and did much of his later writing in English. During the First World War he became one of the best known voices of occupied Belgium, and Edward Elgar set three of his wartime poems for reciter and orchestra, among them Carillon (1914). In 1933 he was appointed Professor of Belgian Studies at the University of London, a post he held until his retirement in 1947. He also wrote on Belgian art and literature and, in The Poetry of Nonsense (1925), on the English appetite for nonsense verse.