William Paton Ker

William Paton Ker (usually referred to as "W. P. Ker"; August 30, 1855 - July 17, 1923) was a Scottish literary scholar and essayist.He was born in Glasgow in 1855. He studied at Glasgow Academy, the University of Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford.

He was appointed to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford in 1879. He became Professor of English Literature and History at the University College of South Wales, Cardiff in 1883; and moved to University College London as Quain Professor in 1889. He was the Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1920 to his death while hill-climbing in Europe. A "W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture" is held at Glasgow University in his honour.

He is referred to repeatedly, with affection and respect in J. R. R. Tolkien's famous essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," and it is likely this lecture which W. H. Auden refers to in offering his own tribute:

(after describing how "surrendering to his immediate desire" 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 passage 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 foreseen. 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,").

Works

*Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (1897); second edition, 1908.
*The Dark Ages [1904]
*Sturla the Historian (1906)
*Tennyson (1909)
*English literature; medieval (1912) — also known as "Medieval English literature" (ISBN-13: 9780198880431 ISBN: 019888043X)
*Two Essays (1918)
*Sir Walter Scott (1919)
*The Art of Poetry (1923)
*Form And Style In Poetry (1928)
*On Modern Literature
*Collected Essays (1968) edited by Charles Whibley

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