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You most likely will not know the name of William Newton. He has been long forgotten, but in his day he was hailed by a contemporary poet, Anna Seward, as the ‘Poet of the Peak’, says writer Laurence Coupe.

She was an established and prolific author, while he was a labouring man with a gift for rhyme. Very few of his poems have survived. Indeed, it’s possible that those are all he ever wrote.

So what do we know about William Newton? He was born in 1750, in the parish of Eyam, Derbyshire, and as a youth he trained as a carpenter.

Anna Seward helped him financially, and supported him in his bid to become a partner in a cotton mill in Cressbrook Dale. He died in 1830 and was buried at Tideswell.

I suppose the question most readers will be asking is whether he was actually any good as a poet. Looking over his modest body of work, I’d say that he had a certain technical skill and a flair for vivid phrases.

In a sonnet written in 1790, he laments the early death of one of his children: ‘My life’s chief gem enwrapped in timeless mould!’

The major poetic influence on Newton was William Collins (1721-59), famous for his Ode to Evening. Perhaps he felt an affinity with the earlier poet, who was known for having a talent that he never fully developed.

In Lines on the Fate of Collins (1792), Newton regrets that his poetic hero was not praised while he was alive: ‘Such envied Genius is alas! Thy fate,/Owned, loved and honoured by the world too late!’ But his estimate of his poetic hero is striking: ‘Thou, gentle Collins, knew’st each fierce extreme,/Neglect’s chill gloom, and Fancy’s sun-bright beam.’ Now he is ‘Placed on Imagination’s airy throne.’

”I suppose the question most readers will be asking is whether he was actually any good as a poet. Looking over his modest body of work, I’d say that he had a certain technical skill and a flair for vivid phrases”, says columnist Laurence Coupe.

Newton’s own obscurity is, though, a cause for regret. His poetry only being known briefly and then forgotten, we might think of Thomas Gray’s famous lines: ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’

Newton’s case is certainly worth pondering. We can all think of people who had talent but who never brought it to fruition or who never had due recognition.

Fortunately, scholars have in recent years been compiling anthologies of ‘English labouring-class poets’: Newton and others like him are being rescued from obscurity.

Column: The curious case of the forgotten ‘Poet of the Peak’