English poet, born in Plymouth, December 1802. Hawker was a famous Cornish parson-poet, whose eccentricities were the talk of the town, such as his marriage to his rich 41-year-old godmother, his supposed ability to see mystic visions, and his unusual fashion sense, which shocked and surprised his contemporaries. One of his chief poetical pieces is his poem “Pompeii”, with which he won the Newdigate Poetry Prize as an Oxford undergraduate. His composition of ballads was mainly based on the legends of Cornwall posthumously published in The Cornish Ballads and Other Poems (1908), which manifest his wide range of knowledge and exceptional passion for antiquity.    (Y. Y.)