Robert Stephen Hawker

1803-1875. English poet. Educated at Cheltenham and Oxford, he spent most of his life as vicar of Morwenstow on the north coast of Cornwall. Although his Anglo-Catholicism was marked by his own eccentricities, he was undoubtedly sincerely attracted to the lore of the Celtic saints, and “A Rapture on the Cornish Hills” seems to record a genuine mystical experience. His most ambitious work is The Quest of the Sangraal (1864), in which he brings out the explicit Christian associations of the Arthurian legend and records the quest as one full of spiritual vitality. There is some controversy as to whether or not he was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church on his deathbed.