Sidney A. Alexander

Who was Sidney A. Alexander?

Sidney Arthur Alexander 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, 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. A modern literary historian sets the poem in the Victorian context of “a trend of swelling interest in the West in Buddhism.”

Alexander built on his academic success in verse by placing a number of poems in some of the leading Victorian periodicals, Academy, English Illustrated Magazine, Macmillan's, Cassell's and others; several of his poems were reprinted in America. But Alexander’s career became that of a clergyman, distinguished to some extent by his religious essays and books but more by his efforts to safeguard the fabric of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he became a Canon in 1909 and where his responsibilities encompassed those of Treasurer. Alexander had been ordained to a curacy at St. Michael's Church, Oxford and was a lecturer and tutor at Keble College, Oxford until his appointment in 1893 as Reader of the Temple, followed by appointments as Canon of Gloucester and head of the Gloucester College of Mission Clergy.