brought back from the dead, to be given a last act of domesticity and a measure of grudging cultural acknowledgement is reprised in Robert Fraser's painstaking biography. Here was a fragile personality, a premature revenant, on the fringe of all the movements. An autodidact blessed like his peers--Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Jones--in avoiding a university miseducation.from The Guardian: Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne by Robert Fraser--review
~~~~~~~~~~~
1 comment :
I first discovered David Gascoyne via his spellbinding 1991 review in the TLS of a major exhibition at the Tate devoted to the work of Max Ernst, a favorite artist of mine. Little did I know then that he had, as a young man over fifty years earlier, pioneered in introducing the Surrealists to the English, and known their divers lumières intimately. Several years later, I ordered his Collected Journals 1936-42, with its wonderfully atmospheric rendering of Paris as night gathered, of his own hazardous mental states, and of his numerous friendships across a dazzling galaxy of artists and poets. Later, I learned of his connection to Kathleen Raine and her own remarkable galaxy of neo-Platonists, Perennialist/Traditionalists, Blakeans and others of the “Inner Light” tendency (Schumacher, Coomaraswamy, Sherrard, Berry, Kumar, Resurgence and Temenos, &c.). The 2001 obituaries in the UK papers were stirring. I only wish more of us here in the US knew of him.
Post a Comment