G. S. Fraser

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

George Sutherland Fraser (8 November 1915 - 3 January 1980) was a Scottish poet, literary critic and academic. He was born in Glasgow, later moving with his family to Aberdeen. He went to the University of St. Andrews.

During World War II he served in the British Army in Cairo and Eritrea. He was published as a poet in Salamander, a Cairo literary magazine. At the same time he was involved with the New Apocalyptics group, writing an introductory essay for the anthology The White Horseman, and formulating as well as anyone did the idea that they were successors to surrealism.

After the war he became a prominent figure in London's literary circles, working as a journalist and critic. Together with his wife Paddy he made friends with a gamut of literary figures, from the intellectual leader William Empson to the eccentric John Gawsworth. He worked with Ian Fletcher to have Gawsworth's Collected Poems (1949) published. His direction was that of the traditional man of letters (soon to become extinct). In 1949 he accepted the job of replacing Edmund Blunden as Cultural Adviser to the UK Liaison Mission in Tokyo. This ended badly when he suffered a breakdown in 1951 while in Japan. Subsequently he was much less the poet than the all-purpose writer.

He became a lecturer at the University of Leicester in 1959, remaining there until retirement in 1979.

[edit] Books

The Fatal Landscape and Other Poems (1941)
Home Town Elegy (1944)
The Traveller has Regrets and Other Poems (1948);
Vision of Scotland (1948)
The Dedicated Life In Poetry, by Patrice de la Tour du Pin (translation, 1948)
News from South America (1949)
Leaves without a Tree (1953)
The Modern Writer and his World (1953)
Springtime (poetry anthology, 1953) editedwith Ian Fletcher
W. B. Yeats (1954)
Scotland (1955) with Edwin Smith
Poetry now: an anthology edited by G.S. Fraser (1956) Faber & Faber
Dylan Thomas (1957)
Vision and Rhetoric. Studies in Modern Poetry (1959)
Keith Douglas. Collected Poems (Second Edition, 1966) edited with John Waller and J. C. Hall.
Ezra Pound (1966)
Lawrence Durrell. A Study (1968) with a bibliography by Alan G. Thomas
Conditions (1969)
Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse (1970)
John Keats: Odes (1971) edited
P. H. Newby (1974)
Essays on Twentieth Century Poets (1977)
Alexander Pope (1978);
Poems of G.S. Fraser (1981) editors Ian Fletcher and John Lucas, Leicester University Press
A Short History of English Poetry 1981
A Stranger and Afraid:Autobiography of an Intellectual (1983) Carcanet Press