Hilaire Belloc (BEHL-ahk) was a prolific and popular writer of prose. He is identified primarily as a historian and defender of the Roman Catholic religion, but he wrote history, biography, travel, literary criticism, church history and religious doctrine, political theory, and translation, as well as some autobiographical travel books which are difficult to categorize. In all, he wrote more than 150 books, as well as many book reviews and magazine articles. His prose and poetry both show a wide range of themes and forms.

Belloc was one of a number of Catholic writers of the period, including Francis Thompson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alice Meynell, and G. K. Chesterton. He wrote rebuttals to views of his Church held by the historians Edward Gibbon, H. G. Wells, and George Coulton, but he could also see its imperfections, remarking to a friend that such an institution could not have lasted a fortnight if it had not been divine.

Although he was a man of letters in many genres, Hilaire Belloc often said in later years that he hoped to be remembered for his poetry. He wrote more than 170 poems in all and was a writer of both light and serious verse. Much of the former was intended for children, but it appealed to adults as well. The first edition of The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts sold out in four days, and four thousand copies were sold in three months. This was followed by other nonsense books which were much praised. The Spectator ranked his satirical and comic verse with that of Edward Lear, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch commended it.

A volume of Belloc’s serious poetry also appeared in 1896, and it increased in size in succeeding editions. Belloc was said by Desmond McCarthy to be the most underrated of poets. At a dinner in his honor on his sixtieth birthday, Chesterton said that such a ceremony “might have been fitting thousands of years ago at the festival of a great Greek poet,” and that “Belloc’s sonnets and strong verse would remain like the cups and carved epics of the Greeks.”

In later years, his poetry has been generally neglected, although the serious poems include many beautiful works. This neglect is probably the result of three circumstances. First, his themes and forms were traditional and classical rather than avant-garde. Second, his reputation as a prose writer made his poems seem secondary. Third, some of his best poems were not published in his collections of poetry until 1938. This was true of many of his epigrams and of the Juliet poems, which had been privately printed. His “Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine” probably has been his most admired work.