DRINKWATER, JOHN (1882-1937), British poet, play wright and critic, born at Leytonstone, Essex, June I, 1882, and educated at the Oxford high school. After 12 years' work as an insurance clerk, he devoted himself to theatrical enterprise, and became manager and producer to the Pilgrim Players, who de veloped into the Birmingham Repertory Theatre Co. His first volume of poems appeared in 1906 and his first play, Coplzetua (in verse), in 1911. He subsequently published several volumes of verse, critical studies on William Morris (1912), Swinburne (1913) and others, and several plays, of which Abraham Lincoln (1918) was produced with great success both in London and in the United States. Among his later plays were the "chronicle dramas" Oliver Cromwell (1921), Mary Stuart (1922) and Robert E. Lee (1923), each of which was performed in London. In 1923 his Collected Poems (2 vol.) were published, and in 1925 The Muse in Council, a collection of essays, and his Collected Plays (2 vol.). In 1925 The Pilgrim of Eternity: Byron—a Con flict, his most important prose work, made its appearance. In 1928 he published Charles James Fox. He died March