Selected Poems: Vernon Watkins

Overview

Vernon Watkins was an accomplished Welsh poet, published throughout his lifetime and acclaimed by his peers, but in recent years, public awareness of Watkins has ceased, creating a bizarre gap in the perception of 20th-century poetry. This new selection introduces his work to a new generation.

Reviews

"The greatest lyric poet of my generation." —Kathleen Raine, author, Collected Poems

"The most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English. . . . The only other poet except me whose poetry I really like today." —Dylan Thomas

"In Vernon's presence, poetry seemed like a living stream, in which one had only to dip the vessel of one's devotion. He made it clear how one could, in fact, 'live by poetry'; it was a vocation, at once difficult as sainthood and easy as breathing." —Philip Larkin, author, A Girl in Winter

Author Biography

Vernon Watkins was under consideration as a poet laureate at the time of his death in 1967. He won several major poetry prizes and had nine volumes of poetry published, among them Affinities, The Ballad of Mari Lwyd and Other Poems, and The Death Bell and Other Poems, as well as a volume of his correspondence with Dylan Thomas. Richard Ramsbotham is a speech and drama teacher who lectured in English at Warsaw University from 1989 to 1993. He is the author of Who Wrote Bacon? William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and James I: A Mystery for the Twenty-first Century.