Frederic William Henry Myers

Frederic William Henry Myers was an English classical scholar, poet, essayist, education official, and pioneering researcher of psychical phenomena. Born at Keswick, Cumberland, on February 6, 1843, he was educated at Cheltenham College and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1860. He won numerous classical and literary distinctions, graduated in 1864, became a Fellow of Trinity in 1865, and served for several years as a college lecturer in classics. In 1872 he became an inspector of schools, a public post he retained for most of the rest of his life.

Myers's early literary career included poetry and criticism. His long poem St. Paul was published in 1867 after an unsuccessful entry for Cambridge's Seatonian Prize. Canterbury hymnological scholarship notes that the poem was written while he was an undergraduate and during a comparatively brief period of explicitly Christian commitment. Myers later published Wordsworth in 1881 and Essays, Classical and Modern in 1883, showing the continuing importance of literature and classical studies in his work.

From the 1870s onward, Myers became increasingly occupied with questions about consciousness, survival after death, telepathy, and other disputed psychological phenomena. In 1882 he joined Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, and others in founding the Society for Psychical Research, becoming one of its most energetic organizers and theorists. His posthumously published Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death became his best-known work in that field. Myers died in Rome on January 17, 1901.

His place in hymnody is comparatively small but distinctive: editors extracted several stanzas from St. Paul to form the Advent hymn now known by its opening words, giving a nineteenth-century literary poem a continuing life in congregational worship.