John William Streets

John William Streets was the eldest son of Mr and Mrs William Streets, of 16, Portland St., Whitwell, Derbyshire as it says in his brief hometown biography.
He was born in 1883 (it is believed) and was one of a family of 12 children born and bred in Whitwell., Derbyshire. He attended the local school and later took a course in French, which he passed with honours. He worked at Whitwell Colliery, where he apparently found the work laborious, routine and uncongenial. However he felt duty-bound to work there in order to help support a large family. It was as a miner he first started writing poetry and soon became known as “The Miner Poet” both because of his work and the theme of much of his poetry.
He became a Sunday School teacher in the local Wesleyan Church but is best remembered as an artist and especially as a poet.
Most of his poetry was completed in a short, intense period of writing between September, 1914 and July, 1916. Streets tried to give literary expression to the life he knew. A long poem dealing with coal mining, the work in which he was engaged when the war called him from the pit, impressed Mr. Herbert Trench when he was acting as adjudicator of the POETRY REVIEW in 1912.
Streets volunteered for the army in the early days of the First World War I. He wrote steadily whilst undergoing military training and when posted abroad. His poetry had a gritty realism developed by his working life and by the war and was not the “pseudo-stuff” that was sought out for literary purposes. Much of his poetry used the sonnet format and was written in pencil on scraps of paper stained with mud and sent off unpolished to Galloway Kyle of The Poetry Review who wrote that it was “sent off unpolished lest the death that lurked by day and night all round should suddenly strike and, as eventually did happen, destroy the poems with the poet, developed a rare spirituality and an unequalled intensity of expression.”
Streets himself wrote in a letter accompanying the sonnets he sent to Kyle …."They were inspired while I was in the trenches, where I have been so busy I have had little time to polish them. I have tried to picture some thoughts that pass through a man's brain when he dies. I may not see the end of the poems, but hope to live to do so. We soldiers have our views of life to express, though the boom of death is in our ears. We try to convey something of what we feel in this great conflict to those who think of us, and sometimes, alas! mourn our loss. We desire to let them know that in the midst of our keenest sadness for the joy of life we leave behind, we go to meet death grim-lipped, clear eyed, and resolute-hearted."
Alas Streets did not survive. He was killed at the start of the Somme offensive in 1916 although his body was not found until 10 months later, shortly after that of his brother who was killed at rhe start of the Vimy offensive Easter 1917.
A collection of his war poems was posthumously published under the title "The Undying Splendour" in May, 1917 and this is the basis of his lasting fame.
John William Streets is buried at Euston Road Cemetery, Colincamps.