- Francis Scarfe
Francis Scarfe (1911 - 1986) was an English poet, critic and novelist, who became an academic, translator and Director of the
British Institute in Paris .He was born in
South Shields ; he was brought up from a young age at the Royal Merchant Seaman's Orphanage. He was educated atDurham University andFitzwilliam College, Cambridge . He then studied at the Sorbonne.While in Paris he wrote
surrealist verse , and dabbled incommunism , from which he then retreated. He taught at theUniversity of Glasgow briefly before the outbreak ofWorld War II , in which he worked in theBritish Army 's Education Corps. He was posted toOrkney , and theFaroe Islands . While in the Orkneys he lodged with the family of the youngGeorge Mackay Brown , on whom he was a major influence.His book from 1942 was one of the first to engage critically with the
Auden Group , if superficially; he returned to Auden in a post-war book of greater depth. After the war he held a number of academic positions.Works
*Inscapes (1940) poems
*Forty Poems and Ballads (1941)
*Auden & After: The Liberation Of Poetry, 1930-41 (1942) criticism
*Promises (?) first novel
*W. H. Auden (1948) criticism
*Underworlds (1950) poems
*Single Blessedness (1951) novel
*The Unfinished Woman (1954) novel
*The Art ofPaul Valéry (1954)
*Picasso by Frank Elgar and Robert Maillard (1956) translator
*Baudelaire (1961, Penguin Books) editor
*Conversations on theDresden Gallery , byLouis Aragon andJean Cocteau (1982) translator
*Complete Verse of Charles P. Baudelaire (1986Anvil Press Poetry ) translator
*Baudelaire: the Poems in Prose (1989,Anvil Press Poetry ) translator
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