G.S. Fraser

G.S. Fraser (1915-1980). Courtesy Scottish Poetry Library.

George Sutherland Fraser (8 November 1915 - 3 January 1980) was a Scottish poet, literary critic, and academic.

Life

Youth and education

Fraser was born in Glasgow, later moving with his family to Aberdeen.

He attended the University of St. Andrews.

Career

During World War II Fraser 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 intellectual leader William Empson to the eccentric John Gawsworth. He worked with Ian Fletcher to have Gawsworth's Collected Poems published in 1949. His direction was that of the traditional man of letters (soon to become extinct).

In 1948, Fraser contributed an essay entitled "A Language by Itself" to a biblio-symposium honouring the 60th birthday of T.S. Eliot. Drawing comparisons with John Donne, he praised the poet's profound refreshment (particularly in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) of the English poetic tongue, together with his subtle facility for transitional verse and his potent effect on the poetic youth; but, more importantly for present purposes, he also confessed, "I am not a very original writer myself; I am lost, on the whole, without a convention of some sort [...]."

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, where he was an inspiring teacher, remaining there until retirement in 1979.

Publications

Poetry

• The Fatal Landscape, and other poems. London: Editions Poetry, 1941.
• Home Town Elegy. London: Editions Poetry, 1944.
• The Traveller has Regrets, and other poems. London: Harvill Press, 1948.
• Leaves without a Tree. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1953.
• Conditions. Nottingham, UK: Byron Press, 1969.
• Poems of G.S. Fraser (edited by Ian Fletcher & John Lucas). Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1981.

Non-fiction

• Vision of Scotland (illustrated by Barbara Jones). London: Paul Elek, 1948.
• News from South America. London: Harvill Press, 1949; New York: Library Publishers, 1952.
• Impressions of Japan, and other essays. Tokyo] Asahi-Shimbun-Sha, 1952.
• Postwar Trends in English Literature. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1950.
• Three Philosophical Essays. London: Elbunsha, 1952.
• The Modern Writer and his World. London: Derek Verschoyle, 1953; New York: Criterion, 1953.
• W.B. Yeats. London & New York: British Council / Longmans, Green, 1954.
• Scotland (photos by Edwin Smith). London: Thames & Hudson, 1955; New York: Studio, 1955.
• Keith Douglas: A poet of the Second World War. London: 1957.
• Dylan Thomas. London & New York: British Council / Longmans, Green, 1957.
• Vision and Rhetoric. Studies in Modern Poetry. London: Faber, 1959.
• Ezra Pound. Edinburgh & London: Oliver & Boyd, 1960; New York: Grove Press, 1961.
• Lawrence Durrell. A study. London: Faber, 1968
  • published in U.S. as Lawrence Durrell. A critical study. New York: Dutton, 1968.
• Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse. London: Routledge, 1970; London & New York: Methuen, 1970.
• P.H. Newby (edited by Ian Scott-Kilvert). Harlow, UK: British Council / Longmans, Green, 1974.
• Essays on Twentieth-Century Poets. Leicester, UK: University of Leicester Press, 1977.
• Alexander Pope. London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
• A Short History of English Poetry. Shepton Mallet, Somerset, UK: Open Books, 1981.
• A Stranger and Afraid: Autobiography of an intellectual. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1983.

Translated

• Patrice de la Tour du Pin, The Dedicated Life In Poetry. London: Harvill Press, 1948.

Edited

• Springtime: An anthology of young poets and writers (edited with Ian Fletcher). London: Peter Owen, 1953.
• Poetry now: an anthology. London: Faber, 1956.
• Robert Burns, Selected Poems. London: Heinemann, 1960.
• Vaughan College Poems. Leicester, UK: University of Leicester Press, 1953.
• Keith Douglas, Collected Poems (edited with John Waller). London: Faber, 1966; New York: Chilmark, 1967.
• John Keats: Odes: A selection of critical essays. London: Macmillan, 1971.
• Return to Oasis: War poems and recollections from the Middle East, 1940-1946 (1980) (edited with Victor Selwyn, Erik de Mauny, Ian Fletcher, & John Waller). London : Shepheard-Walwyn / Editions Poetry London / Salamander Oasis Trust, 1980.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Poets in Poetry Now (1956)

A. Alvarez - Kingsley Amis - W.G. Archer - Patricia Avis - Bernard Bergonzi - Thomas Blackburn - Arthur Boyars - Alan Brownjohn - George Bruce - Charles Causley - Robert Conquest - Hilary Corke - Maurice James Craig - Donald Davie - Paul Dehn - Keith Douglas - Lawrence Durrell - D.J. Enright - Iain Fletcher - Roy Fuller - Robert Garioch - David Gascoyne - Sidney Goodsir Smith - W.S. Graham - Thom Gunn - J.C. Hall - Michael Hamburger - Jacquetta Hawkes - John Heath Stubbs - Geoffrey Hill - John Holloway - Elizabeth Jennings - Peter Johnson - Sidney Keyes - Thomas Kinsella - James Kirkup - Philip Larkin - Laurie Lee - Alun Lewis - Christopher Logue - Rob Lyle - George MacBeth - Norman MacCaig - Mairi MacInnes - Ewart Milne - Richard Murphy - Norman Nicholson - Kathleen Nott - Philip Oakes - Jonathan Price - F.T. Prince - Henry Reed - Anne Ridler - W.R. Rodgers - Alan Ross - E. J. Scovell - Tom Scott - John Short - Jon Silkin - Burns Singer - Robin Skelton - Martin Seymour Smith - Bernard Spencer - R.S. Thomas - Terence Tiller - Charles Tomlinson - Constantine Trypanis - John Wain - John Waller - Vernon Watkins - Gordon Wharton - Sheila Wingfield - Diana Witherby - David Wright

See also

• List of British poets

References

• Sutherland, George Fraser. "A Language by Itself." In T.S. Eliot: A Symposium, (edited by Richard March & T. Tambimuttu), London: Editions Poetry, 1948, 167-177.

External links

Poems

• G.S. Fraser (1915-1980) at the Scottish Poetry Library ("Home Town Elegy")
• "The Traveller Has Regrets"
• G.S. Fraser 1915-1980 at the Poetry Foundation

Prose

• G.S. Fraser in the New York Review of Books

Books

• George Sutherland Fraser at Amazon.com

About

• George Sutherland Fraser 1915-1980 at the Salamander Oasis Trust
• "G.S. Fraser: A Memoir" by Paddy Fraser, Jacket magazine.