THWAITE, Anthony (Simon)

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Nationality: British. Born: Chester, Cheshire, 23 June 1930. Education: Leeds; Sheffield; the United States, 1940–44; at Kingswood School, Bath; Christ Church, Oxford, B.A. (honors) 1955, M.A.1959. Military Service: 1949–51. Family: Married Ann Harrop (i.e., the writer Ann Thwaite) in 1955; four daughters. Career: Visiting lecturer in English literature, Tokyo University, Japan, 1955–57; radio producer, BBC, London, 1957–62; literary editor, The Listener, London, 1962–65; assistant professor of English, University of Libya, Benghazi, 1965–67; literary editor, New Statesman, London, 1968–72; visiting professor, University of Kuwait, 1974; co-editor, Encounter, London, 1973–85; poetry adviser, Secker and Warburg publishers, London, 1971–86; poet-in-residence, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 1992. Editorial director, 1986–95, and until 1995 editorial consultant, Andre Deutsch publishers, London. Awards: Richard Hillary memorial prize, 1968; Henfield Writing fellowship, University of East Anglia, Norwich, summer 1972; Cholmondeley award, 1983; Japan Foundation fellowship, University of Tokyo, 1985–86. Honorary fellow, Westminster College, Oxford, 1991. D. Litt.: University of Hull, 1989. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1978. O.B.E. (Officer, Order of the British Empire), 1990. Address: The Mill House, Low Tharston, Norfolk NR15 2YN, England.

Publications

Poetry

(Poems). Oxford, Fantasy Press, 1953.

Home Truths. Hessle, Yorkshire, Marvell Press, 1957.

Poems. Privately printed, Tokyo, 1957.

The Owl in the Tree. London, Oxford University Press, 1963.

The Stones of Emptiness: Poems 1963–66. London, Oxford University Press, 1967.

Penguin Modern Poets 18, with A. Alvarez and Roy Fuller. London, Penguin, 1970.

Points. London, Turret, 1972.

Inscriptions: Poems 1967–72. London, Oxford University Press, 1973.

Jack. Hitchin, Hertfordshire, Cellar Press, 1973.

New Confessions. London, Oxford University Press, 1974.

A Portion for Foxes. London, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Victorian Voices. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1980.

Telling Tales. Sidcot, Somerset, Gruffyground Press, 1983.

Poems 1953–1983. London, Secker and Warburg, 1984.

Letter from Tokyo. London, Century Hutchinson, 1987.

Poems 1953–1988. London, Century Hutchinson, 1989.

The Dust of the World. London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994.

Selected Poems 1956–1996. London, Enitharmon Press, 1997.

A Different Country: New Poems. London, Enitharmon Press, 2000.

Other

Essays on Contemporary English Poetry: Hopkins to the Present Day. Tokyo, Kenkyusha, 1957; revised edition, as Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction, London, Heinemann, 1959; Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1961.

Japan in Colour, photographs by Roloff Beny. London, Thamesand Hudson, and New York, McGraw Hill, 1967.

The Deserts of Hesperides: An Experience of Libya. London, Secker and Warburg, and New York, Roy, 1969.

Poetry Today 1960–1973. London, Longman, 1973; revised edition, as Poetry Today: A Critical Guide to British Poetry 1960–1984, 1985; revised edition, as Poetry Today, 1960–1995, 1995.

Roloff Beny in Italy, with Peter Porter. London, Thames and Hudson, and New York, Harper, 1974.

Beyond the Inhabited World: Roman Britain (for children). London, Deutsch, 1976; New York, Seabury Press, 1977.

Twentieth-Century English Poetry. London, Heinemann, and New York, Barnes and Noble, 1978.

Odyssey: Mirror of the Mediterranean, photographs by Roloff Beny. London, Thames and Hudson, and New York, Harper, 1981.

Six Centuries of Verse. London, Thames TV-Methuen, 1984.

Using the Past: Contemporary Poets and History (lecture). Tokyo, English Literary Society of Japan, 1985.

Anthony Thwaite in Conversation with Peter Dale and Ian Hamilton. London, Between the Lines, 1999.

Editor, with Hilary Corke and William Plomer, New Poems 1961. London, Hutchinson, 1961.

Editor, and Translator with Geoffrey Bownas, The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse. London, Penguin, 1964; revised edition, 1998.

Editor, with Peter Porter, The English Poets: From Chaucer to Edward Thomas. London, Secker and Warburg, 1974.

Editor, Poems for Shakespeare 3. London, Globe Playhouse, 1974.

Editor, with Fleur Adcock, New Poetry 4. London, Hutchinson, 1978.

Editor, Larkin at Sixty. London, Faber, 1982.

Editor, with Howard Sergeant, The Gregory Awards Anthology 1981–1982. Manchester, Carcanet, 1982.

Editor, with John Mole, Poetry 1945 to 1980. London, Longman, 1983.

Editor, Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin. London, Faber, 1988:New York, Farrar Straus, 1989.

Editor, Selected Letters, by Philip Larkin. London, Faber, 1992; New York, Farrar, Straus, 1993.

Editor, Selected Poems, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. London, Everyman's Library, 1993.

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Manuscript Collections: Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull; Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

Critical Studies: British Poetry between the Movement and Modernism: Anthony Thwaite and Philip Larkin by Hans Osterwalder, Heidelberg, Germany, Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1991; by Penelope Fitzgerald, in New Criterion, 11(7), March 1993; by John Simon, in Book World, 23(50), 12 December 1993.

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Paradox confronts the reader of the work of Anthony Thwaite. He is a man with strong domestic ties who is impelled to uproot himself in search of new horizons, a creature of habit who resents it, inwardly longing for a change of scene, a modern poet with a deep and abiding sense of the past, a formal, austere artist troubled by a lurking unease, an inveterate collector who admits to the futility of life. Thwaite sets down his contradictions with dispassionate honesty, blending them into a body of work striking in its range and conviction, at once urbane and challenging.

Collecting is the most obvious of Thwaite's traits, and it is described and mulled over in several poems. Wherever Thwaite goes, he takes "luggage" with him, as "Personal Effects" testifies: "an affluent magpie in a nest that creaks /With impedimenta." In "The Antiquarian" he asks himself the reason for this compulsive hoarding but finds no definite answer. Further reading suggests that, in fact, these random collections of objects serve him as evidence of the physical world and more subtly as talismans, proofs, and reminders of past ages. By them history is made a continuum in which the endless cycle of man's rise, brief glory, and inevitable fall are mirrored in a pattern of centuries. This linking of past and present in an unbroken sequence enables Thwaite to unite them in "The Letters of Synesius," with the laconic epistles of the fourth-century bishop interwoven with the poet's current asides and the barbarian invaders given modern parallels as tourists and oil tycoons. This ability to project himself into a figure from the past surfaces again in Victorian Voices, a series of monologues by factual and fictitious personalities of the age. Thwaite excels in these portraits, whether presenting the children's author drawing homilies from nature, the doomed rebellion of a novelist's wife, or the engaging roguery of the anonymous Irish beggar. Victorian Voices is possibly the most sustained of Thwaite's collections and is undeniably impressive, but one hesitates to call it his best. A certain sameness of tone denies it that range and diversity characteristic of the poet's finest work.

Thwaite is fascinated by history and by the message that is decoded from the archaeological fragments he assembles. Burrowing in the ruins of Jamestown or eyeing the crumbling cliff edges of Dunwich, he finds proof of mankind's fragility, the slow wearing away of all things under the pressure of time. The images reappear in "The Stones of Emptiness," the desert boulders of the title poem emphasizing the wilderness ("They define the void. They assert /How vast the distance are, featureless, bare …"). Dust is seen as the one unalterable substance, the common denominator to which everything must be reduced.

Dust is the dominant theme in the collection The Dust of the World, in which Thwaite once more examines the inevitability of decay and the transience of human civilization and struggles to find "a meaning in our mess." Here, in verses that range over his experiences as a lecturer in Japan and the United States, as a visitor to Asia and eastern Europe, and as an archaeologist on digs and a wanderer around museums, Thwaite provides his own commentary on the frailty of mankind. "Levelling" and "Under the Campus" find him reminded of his own mortality while confronting the litter of past ages; in "Accumulations" he baulks at the incredible mass of literature and artifacts on which the dust settles so relentlessly. The horrors of war invade his mind in "Sarajevo II" and in "Franklin and Nashville: 1864," where he reveals the ugly reality of death beneath the textbook utterances. Elsewhere he shows a wry amusement in his memories of poetry festivals, and in "Memoir" and "The Notebooks" he explores the nature and origins of literary self-expression. The Dust of the World also includes moving elegies of fellow writers and the author's boyhood recollections of World War II. In this collection, as in all of his work, Thwaite finds himself caught in a painful search for the right words, forever striving to encapsulate the essence of a moment that is doomed to fade and vanish. The Dust of the World is further evidence of his skill in achieving this seemingly impossible task.

Recent years have seen Thwaite increasingly involved in critical and editorial work. His editing of the Collected Poems and Selected Letters of his friend and fellow poet, the late Philip Larkin, and his Selected Poems of Longfellow, are testimony to his ability in this field, while in Poetry Today, 1960–95 he provides his own thoughtful assessment of his contemporaries. A highly accomplished, disciplined writer with an awareness of tradition and the "rules of poetry," Thwaite remains unconvinced by the protest and performance movements of the 1960s and by what he sees as the overt politicizing of the form. Selected Poems 1956–1996 brings together classic examples of his earlier writing—"Mr. Cooper," "The Letters of Synesius," "Dust," "Victorian Voices," among others—with new, previously unpublished poems that once more present the deepest of feelings in neat, well-structured forms. "Changing Ties," in which the poet reflects on the difference between the black and the flowery ties he swaps while traveling from a funeral to a wedding ("Leaving what was, moving towards what is") manages to convey a great deal in a handful of lines. This, one feels, is the essence of poetry, and it is a terrain that Thwaite knows better than most.

—Geoff Sadler