Terence Tiller

by George J. Dance

Terence Tiller (1916-1987). Courtesy Times Literary Supplement.

Terence Rogers Tiller (19 September 1916 - 24 December 1987) was an English poet, playwright, and radio producer.

Life

Youth and education

Tiller was born in Truro, Cornwall.

He studied history at the University of Cambridge, where he earned a B.A..

Career

Tiller lectured on medieval history at Cambridge, from 1937 to 1939.

He spent World War II in Cairo, Egypt, where he lectured on English history and literature at Fuad I University.

In 1946 he joined the BBC features department as a radio producer. He worked for the BBC for the next 30 years, producing hundreds of radio plays and feature broadcasts. In 1955 he was producer of the earliest BBC radio adaptation of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (which did not please the author). He later brought work by Mervyn Peake to the airwaves. In 1964 he moved to the drama department. He has written and produced radio scripts on a wide range of subjects, but mainly on history, literature and mythology.

His work on the weekly chess program on the Third Programme led to his book Chess Treasury of the Air.

Writing

Encyclopædia Britannica: "The Inward Animal (1943) and Unarm, Eros (1947) contain his most highly acclaimed poems, noted for their strong formal pattern, heraldic imagery, and striking sensuousness."

Times Literary Supplement: "His voice was always more Wilfred Owen than Edward Thomas, and he chose not to change it to something plainer as other poets of the so-called Apocalyptic generation (John Heath-Stubbs, George Barker, W.S. Graham) did."

Critical reputation

Though highly regarded in his day, Tiller's poetry is hardly ever anthologized today, and is invariably ignored in studies of 20th-century British poetry.

Recognition

In 2016, the centenary of Tiller's birth, Eyewear Publishing released Tiller's Collected Poems in a hardcover edition, with a scholarly introduction by Todd Swift.

Publications

Poetry

• Poems. London: Hogarth Press, 1941.
• The Inward Animal. London: Hogarth Press, 1943.
• Unarm, Eros. London: Hogarth Press, 1947.
• Reading a Medal, and other poems. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
• Notes for a Myth, and other poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968.
• That Singing Mesh, and other poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1979.
• Collected Poems (with introduction by Todd Swift). London: Eyewear Publishing, 2016.

Translated

• William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman (translated into Modern English verse). Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1997
  • (printed with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo). London: Everyman, 2001.
• Dante, Inferno: The new annotated BBC edition (in Italian & English). London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1966; New York: Schocken Books, 1966.
• John Gower, Confessio Amantis: 'The Lover's Shrift'; (translated nto Modern English verse). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics (L128), 1963.

Anthologized

• The New British Poetry: An anthology (edited by Kenneth Rexroth). Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1949.

Edited

• Chess Treasury of the Air. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Handbooks (PH124), 1966.
• New Poems: A PEN anthology, 1960 (edited with Anthony Cronin & Jon Silkin). London: Hutchinson, 1960.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

External links

Books

• Terence Tiller at Amazon.com

About

• Terence Tiller at the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Introduction to Tiller's Collected Poems at Eyewear

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