Seán Rafferty

Seán Rafferty (5 February 1909 – 4 December 1998), a Scottish poet, was born in Kettleholm, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and lived in England from 1932. Though his poetry has been praised by such prominent poets as Sorley MacLean, Ted Hughes and Hugh MacDiarmid Fact|date=August 2008and published in collections by the major British poetry presses Carcanet and Etruscan, his work has generally been neglected and is rarely anthologized.

The death of Rafferty's first wife, Betty Bryant, in 1945, by whom he had a daughter, figures prominently in his poetry. He married Peggy Laing in 1947 and the next year moved with her to Devon, where he lived until his death.

Writings

Rafferty's poetic work is squarely within the Anglo-American modernist tradition, reflecting variously the influence of traditional English lyric, Celtic bardic poetry, balladry, and popular song. His recurrent mode is gentle melancholy overlaying a deeply tragic vision, while the minor portion of his verse which is comic is often very funny. Some of his most notable poems are about either childhood or old age.

References

Books by Seán Rafferty

* "Collected Poems", edited by Nicholas Johnson, Manchester: Carcanet, 1995..
* "Poems", edited by Nicholas Johnson, Buckfastleigh, South Devonshire : Etruscan Books ; Berkeley, CA : Distributed in America by SPD, 1999. [Revised and enlarged version of the 1995 Carcanet edition.]
* "Poems, Revue Sketches, and Fragments", edited by Nicholas Johnson, Buckfastleigh, South Devonshire : Etruscan Books; Berkeley, CA : Distributed in America by SPD, 2004.