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Fantasy Press (poetry)
The Fantasy Press was an English publisher of poetry between 1951 and 1962, allied to the Oxford University Poetry Society and superintended by the painter and illustrator Oscar Mellor. As well as publishing a regular series of pamphlets by undergraduate and graduate poets between 1952 and 1957, it also brought out longer collections by some, as well as anthologies of university poetry containing their work. A local stimulus The firm was established by Oscar Mellor in Swinford, Oxfordshire, primarily to finance his work as an artist, but gained a high-profile through publishing a series of poets who became major figures of The Movement and The Group - as well as others who went on to make their name in the US, such as Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Richard Selig and George Steiner. English Poets who had early works published by the Fantasy Press included Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill. As well as those who made a short first appearance in the Fanta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oscar Mellor
Oscar Mellor (7 June 1921 – 2005) was an English surrealist artist and publisher of poetry. An associate of the Birmingham Surrealists in the 1940s, he founded the Fantasy Press in the 1950s, publishing works by poets such as Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn.. Although he became best known as a publisher, he saw himself primarily as an artist whose business activities existed to support his painting. Biography Oscar Mellor was born and educated in Manchester, moving to Birmingham with his family in 1939 and serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He had been painting surrealist watercolours from the age of 15, but took up painting more seriously on returning from the war in 1946, studying part-time at the Birmingham School of Art and the Ruskin School and becoming an associate of Conroy Maddox and the Birmingham Surrealists.. In 1947 he was a founder member of the Birmingham Artists Committee - which existed to organise exhibitions of avant-garde artists ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as ''Lucky Jim'' (1954), ''One Fat Englishman'' (1963), ''Ending Up'' (1974), ''Jake's Thing'' (1978) and ''The Old Devils'' (1986). His biographer Zachary Leader called Amis "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." He is the father of the novelist Martin Amis. In 2008, ''The Times'' ranked him ninth on a list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Life and career Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in Clapham, south London, the only child of William Robert Amis (1889–1963), a clerk for the mustard manufacturer Colman's in the City of London, and his wife Rosa Annie (née Lucas). The Amis grandparents were wealthy. Wil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Lucie-Smith
John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith (born 27 February 1933), known as Edward Lucie-Smith, is a Jamaican-born English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster. He has been highly prolific in these fields, writing or editing over a hundred books, his subjects gradually shifting around the late 1960s from mostly literature to mostly art. Biography Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of Mary Frances (née Lushington) and John Dudley Lucie-Smith. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1946.BiographRetrieved 4 October 2018./ref> He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and, after a little time in Paris, he read history at Merton College, Oxford, from 1951 to 1954. After serving in the Royal Air Force as an education officer and working as a copywriter, he became a full-time writer (as well as anthologist and photographer). He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum in organising The Group, a London-centred poets' group. At the beginning of the 1980s he conducted several ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell FRSL (24 October 1932 – 20 December 2008) was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement. The critic Kenneth Tynan called him "the British Mayakovsky". Mitchell sought in his work to counteract the implications of his own assertion that, "Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people." In a National Poetry Day poll in 2005 his poem "Human Beings" was voted the one most people would like to see launched into space. In 2002 he was nominated, semi-seriously, Britain's "Shadow Poet Laureate". Mitchell was for some years poetry editor of the ''New Statesman'', and was the first to publish an interview with the Beatles. His work for the Royal Shakespeare Company included Peter Brook's '' US'' and the English version of Peter Weiss's ''Marat/Sade''. Ever inspired by th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Boyars
Arthur Boyars (28 May 1925 – 6 August 2017)Nicholas Jacobs ''The Independent'', 14 August 2017. was a British poet and musicologist, who was also a translator and critic, literary editor and publisher. His ''Poems'' were published in 1944 by Fortune Press. He started the small magazine ''Mandrake'' in 1946 with John Wain while at Wadham College, Oxford, subtitled "An Oxford Review"; it was published until 1957. Boyars was editor of ''Oxford Poetry'' in 1948. He is known also as a translator of Russian poetry. He became the second husband of Marion Lobbenberg, who formed a partnership with John Calder in the publishing house Calder & Boyars. Boyars's name is associated with the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. In 2011 Boyars published a limited edition of his own poetry, ''Dictations: Selected Poems 1940–2009'', which was described by the critic Alberto Manguel as "Dantesque". Works *(ed. with Barry Hamer), ''Oxford Poetry 1948'', Oxford: Blackwell, 1948 *(trans. with D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anthony Thwaite
Anthony Simon Thwaite (23 June 1930 – 22 April 2021) was an English poet and critic, widely known as the editor of his friend Philip Larkin's collected poems and letters. Early years and education Born in Chester, England, to Yorkshire parents, Thwaite at the age of 10 crossed the Atlantic alone to spend the war years in and around Washington D.C. with an aunt and uncle. On D-Day in 1944 he was on his way home. At Kingswood School, Bath, a teacher, praising his Anglo-Saxon type riddles, encouraged him to think he was a poet. National Service near Leptis Magna in Libya, encouraged him further, both as a poet and as an amateur archaeologist (he eventually became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries). Thwaite came to early prominence as a poet. While still an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, he published a pamphlet with the Fantasy Press in a series that included the early work of Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jennings. Poems began to appear in '' The Listener ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Al Alvarez
Alfred Alvarez (5 August 1929 – 23 September 2019) was an English poet, novelist, essayist and critic who published under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez. Background Alfred Alvarez was born in London, to an Ashkenazic Jewish mother and a father from a Sephardic Jewish family. He was educated at The Hall School in Hampstead, London, and then Oundle School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he took a First in English. He was subsequently elected as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. After teaching briefly in Oxford and the United States, he became a full-time writer in his late twenties. From 1956 to 1966, he was the poetry editor and critic for ''The Observer'', where he introduced British readers to John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Zbigniew Herbert, and Miroslav Holub. Alvarez was the author of many non-fiction books. His renowned study of suicide, '' The Savage God'', gained added resonance from his friendship with Plath. He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Martin Seymour-Smith
Martin Roger Seymour-Smith (24 April 1928 – 1 July 1998) was a British poet, literary critic, and biographer. Biography Seymour-Smith was born in London and educated at Highgate School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was editor of ''Isis'' and ''Oxford Poetry''. His father Frank was a chief librarian who supplied books to Robert Graves, and who published the survey ''An English Library, an Annotated List of 1300 Classics'' in 1943, followed by ''What Shall I Read Next: a Personal Selection of Twentieth Century English Books'' in 1953. His mother Marjorie wrote poetry and published under the name of Elena Fearn. He began as one of the most promising of Anglophone post-war poets, but became better known as a critic, writing biographies of Robert Graves (whom he met first at age 14 and maintained close ties with), Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy, and producing numerous critical studies. The poet and critic Robert Nye stated that Seymour-Smith was "one of the finest Brit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul West (writer)
Paul Noden West (23 February 1930 – 18 October 2015) was a British-born American novelist, poet, and essayist. He was born in Eckington, Derbyshire in England to Alfred and Mildred (Noden) West. Before his death, he resided in Ithaca, New York, with his wife Diane Ackerman, a writer, poet, and naturalist. West is the author of more than 50 books. Early life West grew up in Eckington, a rural mining town in Derbyshire, England. His father, partly blinded in World War I, was often unemployed. His mother, a talented pianist, gave private lessons to help support the family. She encouraged West in his love of words and his literary ambitions. In a 1989 interview by author and literary critic David W. Madden, West said he was also encouraged by three teachers, "amazing women who taught English, French, and Latin and Greek" at an otherwise "mediocre grammar school". They were, he said, "...marvelous to me. They encouraged me because they felt I had some gift for languages and s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Dale Scott
Peter Dale Scott (born 11 January 1929) is a Canadian-born poet, academic, and former diplomat. A son of the Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott and painter Marian Dale Scott, he is best known for his critiques of deep politics and American foreign policy since the era of the Vietnam War. Notably, he was a signatory in 1968 of the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, in which participants vowed to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Although trained as a political scientist, Scott holds an atypical academic appointment as a poet-scholar in an English department. Academic and diplomatic career After receiving undergraduate degrees in philosophy (first-class honours) and political science (second-class honours) from McGill University in 1949, he studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (France, 1949) and University College, Oxford (1950-1952) before receiving a Ph.D. in political science from McGill (with a dissertation on the social ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Octavo
Octavo, a Latin word meaning "in eighth" or "for the eighth time", (abbreviated 8vo, 8º, or In-8) is a technical term describing the format of a book, which refers to the size of leaves produced from folding a full sheet of paper on which multiple pages of text were printed to form the individual sections (or ''gatherings'') of a book. An octavo is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets (e.g. of A2 paper) on which 16 pages of text were printed, which were then folded three times to produce eight leaves. Each leaf of an octavo book thus represents one eighth the size of the original sheet. Other common book formats are folios and quartos. ''Octavo'' is also used as a general description of the ''size'' of books that are about tall (almost A4 paper size), and as such does not necessarily indicate the actual printing format of the books, which may even be unknown as is the case for many modern books. These terms are discussed in greater detail in book sizes. For ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ted Hughes
Edward James "Ted" Hughes (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 ''The Times'' ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath from 1956 until her death by suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. His last poetic work, ''Birthday Letters'' (1998), explored their relationship. Biography Early life Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street, in Mytholmroyd in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to William Henry (1894–1981) and Edith ( Farrar) Hughes (1898–1969), and raised among the local farms of the Calder Valley and on the Pennine moorland. Hughes's sister Olwyn Marguerite Hughes (1928–2016) was two years older and his brother Gerald (1920†... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
