FALCK, (Adrian) Colin 1934-

PERSONAL: Born July 14, 1934, in London, England; son of Frederick Walter (an orphanage secretary and Baptist minister) and Jessie Dorothy (a secretarial worker; maiden name née Edmonds) Falck; married Linda Diane (a painter), 1977 (divorced 1984); married Sonja Esterhuyse (a psychotherapist), 1999; children: (first marriage) Diana, (second marriage (Damon). Education: Magdalen College, Oxford, B.A. (philosophy, politics, and economics), 1957, B.A. (philosophy, psychology, and physiology), 1959, M.A., 1986; University of London, Ph.D. (literary theory), 1988. Politics: Labour Party. Religion: None.

ADDRESSES: Home—20 Thurlow Rd., London NW3 5PP, Englang. Agent—John Johnson Ltd., Clerkenwell House, 45-47 Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R OHT, England.

CAREER: University of London, London School of Economics, London, England, lecturer in sociology, 1961-62; University of Maryland, European Division, London, part-time lecturer in philosophy, 1962-64; University of London, Chelsea College, lecturer in modern literature, 1964-84; Syracuse University, London program, part-time lecturer in literature, 1985-89; Antioch University, London program, part-time lecturer in literature; York College, York, PA, associate professor, 1989-99. The Review (poetry magazine), coeditor, 1962, coeditor, 1965-72; poetry editor, the New Review, 1974-78. Military service: British Army, Royal Artillery, 1952-54; Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, 1954-56.

WRITINGS:

The Garden in the Evening: Poems from the Spanish of Antonio Machado (pamphlet), The Review (Oxford, England), 1964.

Promises (poetry pamphlet), The Review (London, England), 1969.

Backwards into the Smoke (poetry), Carcanet (Cheadle, Cheshire, England), 1973.

(Editor, with Ian Hamilton) Poems since 1900: An Anthology of British and American Verse in the Twentieth Century, Macdonald & Janes (London, England), 1975.

In This Dark Light (poetry pamphlet), TNR (London, England), 1978.

(Editor) Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems, 1987.

Myth, Truth, and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1989, second edition, 1994.

(Editor) Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems: The Centenary Edition, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1991, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1992.

Memorabilia (poems), Stride (Exeter, England), 1992.

Post-Modern Love: An Unreliable Narration (poems), Stride (Exeter, England), 1997.

American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century: The Poetry That Matters (critical history), Ashgate (Burlington, VT, 2003.

Contributor to literary and philosophical journals in England and the United States.

SIDELIGHTS: Beginning in the 1960s, Colin Falck was among the English poets who, through their association with the the poetry magazine the Review, tried to revive some of the ideas and methods of Imagism. Falck's earlier poems attempted to capture the emotional impact and inward truth of particular moments in time, and were often very short. His first publication was a collection of verses adapted from the Spanish of Antonio Machado in The Garden in the Evening: Poems from the Spanish of Antonio Machado, which a contributor to The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English described as "the best of the many that have been attempted. In his later work, he has moved towards more traditional verse-patterns. His Post-Modern Love is a sequence of fifty Petrarchan sonnets, which tells the story of a marriage."

Falck has also edited centenary selections of the American poets Robinson Jeffers and Edna St. Vincent Millay. He has written extensively about philosophy, his most ambitious contribution to this field of study so far is his Myth, Truth, and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism, which according to to a Religious Studies contributor discusses "the relationship between theology and literature." "Myth, Truth, and Literature argues that literature can reveal truths otherwise inexpressible through the use of myth," commented James Seaton in Philosophy and Literature. Myth, Truth, and Literature opposes post-structionalist and post-modernist literary theory and calls for a return to the principles of German and British romanticism.

In American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century: The Poetry That Matters, Falck offers a critical history of twentieth-century poetry in terms of these ideas. He aims to show—despite all its recent actual failings—what ought to be the place of poetry (and more generally of literature) in the modern human world.

Falck once commented, "My main literary interest is in poetry and is divided between 1) writing it, 2) criticizing it, and 3) trying to explain why almost no one reads it except people who i) write it, ii) criticize it, or iii) (etc. etc.)."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Acumen, April, 1992, William Oxley, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism; October, 1992, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay; April, 1993, review of Memorabilia; January 1998, Glyn Pursglove, review of Post-Modern Love, p. 107.

Agenda, 1990, Robert Stein, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, pp. 73-73; summer, 1992, Philip Hoy, review of Memorabilia, pp. 36-42.

Chapman, June, 1993, review of Memorabilia.

Commentary, June, 1992, Evelyn Toynton, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems: The Centenary Edition, p. 59.

Houston Post, July, 1993, Robert Phillips, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Independent, May, 1992, Jill Neville, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Irish Times, June, 1992, Eavan Boland, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, winter, 1991, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, p. 102.

Literature and Theology, April, 1991, Graham Ward, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature.

London Review of Books, June, 1992, review of Memorabilia.

Modern Language Review, April, 1992, Steven Connor, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, p. 422.

New Criterion, April, 1992, Mary Jo Slater, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay, pp. 23-29.

New Republic, January 6, 1992, Amy Clampitt, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay, p. 44.

New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1992, Liz Rosenberg, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay, p. 3.

Philosophy, April, 1990, Martin Warner, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, p. 237.

Philosophy and Literature, 1990, Richard Eldridge, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, pp. 227-228; 1996, James Seaton, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, pp. 264-266.

PN Review, November, 1993, review of Memorabilia. Poetry Review, summer, 1989, Edna Longley, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, pp. 15-16; summer, 1992, review of Memorabilia.

PQS, spring, 1998, review of Post-Modern Love: An Unreliable Narration, pp. 75-76.

Referatedienst zur Literaturwissenschaft, March, 1990, Rainer M. Wallat, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature.

Religious Studies, September, 1995, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, p. 413.

Reviewing Sociology, 1990, Andrew Travers, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, pp. 35-38

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December, 1991, Charles Guenther, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Sewanee Review, spring, 1996, Judith Weissman, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, p. 35.

Stand, summer, 1993, review of Memorabilia.

Sunday Telegraph, April, 1992, Hugo Williams, review of Memorabilia.

Theology, August, 1991, Graham Ward, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature.

Times, May, 1992, Robert Nye, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Times Literary Supplement, December 22, 1989, Michael Walters, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature, p. 1419; August 21, 1992, Nicholas Everett, review of Edna St. Vincent Millay, p. 19; January, 1998, Hugo Williams, review of Post-Modern Love; September 4, 1998, Janet Montefiore, "Post-Modern Love: An Unreliable Narration," p. 22.

Zeitschrift für Anglistik and Amerikanistik, Volume 40, 1992, Wolfgang Wicht, review of Myth, Truth, and Literature.