George Barker (poet)

George Granville Barker (26 February 1913 – 27 October 1991) was an English poet and author.

Life and work

Barker was born in Loughton, near Epping Forest in Essex, England, and was raised by his Irish mother and English father in Battersea, London. He was educated at an L.C.C. school and at Regent Street Polytechnic. He left school at the age of 14 and pursued several odd jobs before settling on a career in writing. Early volumes of note by Barker include "Thirty Preliminary Poems" (1933), "Poems" (1935) and "Calamiterror" (1937), which was inspired by the Spanish Civil War.

In his early twenties, Barker had already been published by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, who also helped him to gain appointment as Professor of English Literature in 1939 at Tohoku University (Sendai, Miyagi, Japan). He left there in 1940 due to the hostilities, but wrote "Pacific Sonnets" during his tenure.

He then travelled to the United States where he began his longtime liaison with writer Elizabeth Smart, by whom he had four of his fifteen children (Barker also had three children by his first wife, Jessica). [cite news |first=Ian |last=Sansom |authorlink= |author= |coauthors= |title=Master of the red Martini |url=http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,,660088,00.html |format= |work= |publisher=The Guardian |pages= |page= |date=March 2, 2002 |accessdate=2008-07-08 |language= |quote=Jessica has just given birth to his twins, Elizabeth Smart is busy giving birth to her second child by him, and he is spending most of his time drinking in London. ] He returned to England in 1943. From the late 1960s until his death, he lived in Itteringham, Norfolk, with his wife Elspeth Barker, the novelist. In 1969 he published the poem "At Thurgarton Church", the village of Thurgarton being a few miles from Itteringham.

Barker's novel "The Dead Seagull", published in 1950, described his affair with Smart, whose 1945 novel "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" was also about the affair.

Barker's "Collected poems" (ISBN 0-571-13972-8) were edited by Robert Fraser and published in 1987 by Faber and Faber.

In describing the difficulties in writing his biography Barker was quoted as saying: "I've stirred the facts around too much, ... It simply can't be done."

External links

* [http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=258 Essay by Robert Fraser, Open University]
* [http://oldpoetry.com/author/George%20Barker Short informal biography with links to some of Barker's poems]
* [http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/barker.htm Barker's Grave]
* [http://www.artofeurope.com/barker/ More links to Barker's poems]
* [http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/manuscripts A large collection of Barker's papers is located at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin]

References