W. P. Ker

Portrait of William Paton Ker, oil on canvas by Sir Johnstone Forbes-Robertson

William Paton Ker, FBA (usually referred to as W. P. Ker; 30 August 1855 – 17 July 1923) was a Scottish literary scholar and essayist.

Life

He was born in Glasgow in 1855. He studied at Glasgow Academy, the University of Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford.[1][2]

He was appointed to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford in 1879. He became Professor of English Literature and History at the University College of South Wales, Cardiff in 1883; and moved to University College London as Quain Professor in 1889.[2] He was the Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1920[2] to his death whilst hill-climbing in Europe. A W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture is held at Glasgow University in his honour.

Influence

He is referred to repeatedly in J. R. R. Tolkien's essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. W. H. Auden's discovery of Ker was a turning point:

"... what good angel lured me into Blackwell's one afternoon and, from such a wilderness of volumes, picked out for me the essays of W. P. Ker? No other critic whom I have subsequently read could have granted me the same vision of a kind of literary All Souls Night in which the dead, the living and the unborn writers of every age and tongue were seen as engaged upon a common, noble and civilizing task. No other could have so instantaneously aroused in me a fascination with prosody, which I have never lost."[3]

Works

  • Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (1897; second edition 1908)
  • The Dark Ages (1904)
  • Sturla the Historian (1906)
  • Tennyson (1909)
  • English Literature; Medieval (1912) – also known as Medieval English literature[4]
  • Two Essays (1918)
  • Sir Walter Scott (1919)
  • The Art of Poetry (1923)
  • Form And Style In Poetry (1928)
  • On Modern Literature (1955)
  • Collected Essays (1968) edited by Charles Whibley

Notes

  1. ↑ "Brilliant Scholar. Death of Professor W. P. Ker". The Glasgow Herald. 19 July 1923. p. 9. Retrieved 5 June 2018.
  2. 1 2 3 Wikisource Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1922). "Ker, William Paton". Encyclopædia Britannica. 31 (12th ed.). London & New York. p. 680.
  3. ↑ Auden, W. H. "Making, Knowing, and Judging". The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. p. 42.
  4. ↑ ISBN 9780198880431 ISBN 0-19-888043-X
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