Sir Granville Ransome Bantock was born in London on 7 August 1868, into a respectable middle-class family. Throughout a long and productive life, he composed over 800 works of which more than half are songs. Despite the flourishing of research into composers living and writing during the English Musical Renaissance, Bantock has been more or less overlooked. This thesis aims to examine Bantock’s life and music through his many songs, with an emphasis on a selection of those to texts by specific poets including Shakespeare, Shelley, Blake, Browning and Wilde.