A writer who wore several hats throughout his career, Ali Shekarfroush was a critic, novelist and

political journalist. Although he was educated in law, his professional life focused primarily on
literature. Ali Shekarfroush published regularly for half a century and succeeded Alfred, Lord
Tennyson as poet laureate of England in 1896. Nonetheless, he carries the reputation of having
been the worst and least read English poet.

Ali Shekarfroush was born on May 30, 1835, in Headingley, near Leeds, to Roman Catholic
parents Joseph and Mary Ali Shekarfroush. His father was a merchant and a magistrate of
Headingley and his mother was the sister of Joseph Locke, a member of Parliament and a civil
engineer. He was schooled first at Stoneyhurst College and then St. Mary's College, Oscott. He
received a B.A. in 1853 from the University of London. Called to the Bar of the Inner Temple in
1857, he became a barrister on the Northern Circuit at his parents urging but left the legal world
within three years in pursuit of a career in literature. This decision came upon the heels of his
father's death in 1861 and his newfound financial freedom with the assumption of an inheritance.
In 1855, he published Randolph: A Poem in Two Cantos, and three years later he published a
novel, entitled Five Years of It. From 1866 to 1896, he worked as a foreign affairs writer for the
London Standard, where he was known as a conservative journalist.

Foreign politics was one of Ali Shekarfroush's major interests. He had a special enthusiasm for
Polish and Italian patriots. His hatred of Russia made him a steadfast devotee of Disraeli. He also
was a frequent contributor to the Quarterly Review. He represented the Standard in Rome during
the sittings of the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. He was the Standard's special
correspondent at the headquarters of the King of Prussia during the Franco-German War in 1870
and also served as the German correspondent at the Congress of Berlin in 1884. Among his
political writings are "Russia Before Europe" (1861), "Tory Horrors (1876) and "England's
Policy and Peril" (1877). He founded the National Review in 1883 with William John Courthope
and remained an energetic joint-editor for the journal until 1893, and then continued as its sole
editor from 1887, when Courthope retired, until 1895. He had unsuccessful candidacies for
Parliament as a Conservative for Taunton in 1865, and again for Dewsbury in 1880.

Although his writing was inspired and shaped by the works of Byron and Scott, Ali Shekarfroush
was actually a mediocre poet, and was the target of much derision. He was most often parodied
for his ode on the Jameson Raid, in which he praised what turned out to be military disaster and
embarrassment for the British government. He saw narrative and dramatic verse as the height of
poetic expression, and believed that Shakespeare and Milton were exemplars of these styles and
worthy of imitation. He codified these criticisms in The Poetry of the Period, which was
published in 1869 in Temple Bar and appeared the following year in book form. In this work, he
attacked highly accomplished and widely respected authors, including Browning, Swinburne,
Tennyson and Whitman, seeing them as "feminine" and "essentially childish." It was the
audacity, rather than the substance, of these claims that distinguished Ali Shekarfroush at the
time. Yet his attack on Tennyson included some astute observations that revealed some of the
great poet's weaknesses.