W. H. Davies

W. H. Davies spent years as a tramp, riding freight trains across America and lodging in doss-houses — until 1899, when he lost a leg jumping a train in Canada. He returned to England, wrote verse in cheap lodging houses, and self-published his way to fame; The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), with a preface by George Bernard Shaw, made him a literary celebrity.

His poem "Leisure" (1911) distilled everything the road had taught him into two of the most quoted lines in English: "What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare." A century of busier and busier readers has kept it permanently relevant.