Sidney A. Alexander Biography | Poet

Sidney Arthur Alexander (April 2, 1866-February 4, 1948) was an English poet, author, and clergyman. The son of a bank clerk, Alexander was educated at St Paul's School and Trinity College, Oxford, where he received his B.A. in 1889 with a number of distinctions and prizes. While at St. Paul’s (the start of a lifetime affiliation with the Cathedral), he won recognition for his poetry, including “Caedmon” the Milton Prize poem in 1882. The promise of those early efforts was crowned by Alexander’s receiving the Newdigate prize at Oxford in 1887 for Sakya-Muni: The Story of Buddha. The poem was generally well received in the Oxford Magazine (“sustained melody and grace….certain higher touches of imagination and expression which give to the simple and quiet style an air of finish and distinction”). A modern literary historian sets the poem in the Victorian context of “a trend of swelling interest in the West in Buddhism .”