Talk:W. P. Ker

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Untitled[edit]

He is mentioned in W. H. Auden's essay (he later took the same poetry chair at Oxford) Making, Knowing, and Judging.

I'm not denying it, but it would be more fascinating if we knew what Auden said. Charles Matthews 20:59, 26 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, here is what he said (it's what led me to find a book on W. P. Ker).

[After describing how "surrending to his immediate deisire" a poet may do the best thing he could have done: he attended a lecture delivered by Tolkien. He remembers not a single word, but at a certain point Tolkien recited a long passege from Beowulf. If not for that he would not have been driven to read and be strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry]

"But this was something which neither I nor anybody else could have forseen. Again, what good angel lured me into Blackwell's one afternoon and, from such a wilderness of volumes, picked out for me the essays of W. P. Ker? No other critic whom I have subsequently read could have granted me the same vision of a kind of literary All Souls Night in which the dead, the living and the unborn writers of every age and tongue were seen as engaged upon a common, noble and civilizing task. No other could have so instantaneously aroused in me a fascination with prosody, which I have never lost." (Page 42, The Dyer's hand and other essays, "Making, Knowing, and Judging,"). Cheers.

(Does this violate copyright? I just noticed the frightening copyright notice).