George Sutherland Fraser (8 November 1915 - 3 January 1980) was a Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 poet, literary critic and academic. He was born in Glasgow

Glasgow

Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...

, later moving with his family to Aberdeen

Aberdeen

Aberdeen is Scotland's third most populous city, one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas and the United Kingdom's 25th most populous city, with an official population estimate of ....

. He went to the University of St. Andrews.

During World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 he served in the British Army

British Army

The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...

 in Cairo

Cairo

Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...

 and Eritrea

Eritrea

Eritrea , officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea derives it's name from the Greek word Erethria, meaning 'red land'. The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast...

. He was published as a poet in Salamander

Salamander: A Miscellany of Poetry

Salamander: A Miscellany of Poetry was an anthology of poetry published by George Allen and Unwin in 1947 and featuring the work of many of the Cairo poets. It was edited by Keith Bullen and John Cromer. The title alluded to the rebirth of culture from the ashes of World War II...

, a Cairo literary magazine. At the same time he was involved with the New Apocalyptics

New Apocalyptics

The New Apocalyptics were a poetry grouping in the UK in the 1940s, taking their name from the anthology The New Apocalypse , which was edited by J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece...

 group, writing an introductory essay for the anthology The White Horseman, and formulating as well as anyone did the idea that they were successors to surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

.

After the war he became a prominent figure in London's literary circles, working as a journalist and critic. Together with his wife Paddy he made friends with a gamut of literary figures, from the intellectual leader William Empson

William Empson

Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet.He was known as "燕卜荪" in Chinese.He was widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, fundamental to the New Critics...

 to the eccentric John Gawsworth

John Gawsworth

John Gawsworth , a pseudonym of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong , was a British writer, poet and compiler of anthologies, both of poetry and of short stories. He also used the pseudonym Orpheus Scrannel...

. He worked with Ian Fletcher to have Gawsworth's Collected Poems (1949) published. His direction was that of the traditional man of letters (soon to become extinct).

In 1948

1948 in literature

The year 1948 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The Pulitzer Prize for the Novel is renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction....

, Fraser contributed an essay

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

 entitled "A Language by Itself" to a biblio

Book

A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...

-symposium

Symposium

In ancient Greece, the symposium was a drinking party. Literary works that describe or take place at a symposium include two Socratic dialogues, Plato's Symposium and Xenophon's Symposium, as well as a number of Greek poems such as the elegies of Theognis of Megara...

 honouring the sixtieth birthday

Birthday

A birthday is a day or anniversary where a person celebrates his or her date of birth. Birthdays are celebrated in numerous cultures, often with a gift, party or rite of passage. Although the major religions celebrate the birth of their founders , Christmas – which is celebrated widely by...

 of TS Eliot. Drawing comparisons with John Donne

John Donne

John Donne 31 March 1631), English poet, satirist, lawyer, and priest, is now considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are notable for their strong and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs,...

, he praised the poet's profound refreshment (particularly in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as Prufrock, is a poem by T. S. Eliot, begun in February 1910 and published in Chicago in June 1915. Described as a "drama of literary anguish," it presents a stream of consciousness in the form of a dramatic monologue, and marked the beginning of...

) of the English poetic tongue, together with his subtle facility for transitional verse and his potent effect on the poetic youth; but, more importantly for present purposes, he also confessed, "I am not a very original writer myself; I am lost, on the whole, without a convention of some sort [...]."

In 1949 he accepted the job of replacing Edmund Blunden

Edmund Blunden

Edmund Charles Blunden, MC was an English poet, author and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong...

 as Cultural Adviser to the UK Liaison Mission in Tokyo. This ended badly when he suffered a breakdown in 1951 while in Japan. Subsequently he was much less the poet than the all-purpose writer.

He became a lecturer at the University of Leicester

University of Leicester

The University of Leicester is a research-led university based in Leicester, England. The main campus is a mile south of the city centre, adjacent to Victoria Park and Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I College....

 in 1959, where he was an inspiring teacher, remaining there until retirement in 1979.

Books

• The Fatal Landscape and Other Poems (1941)
• Home Town Elegy (1944)
• The Traveller has Regrets and Other Poems (1948);
• Vision of Scotland (1948)
• The Dedicated Life In Poetry, by Patrice de la Tour du Pin (translation, 1948)
• News from South America (1949)
• Leaves without a Tree (1953)
• The Modern Writer and his World (1953)
• Springtime (poetry anthology, 1953) edited with Ian Fletcher
• W. B. Yeats (1954)
• Scotland (1955) with Edwin Smith
• Poetry now: an anthology edited by G.S. Fraser (1956) Faber & Faber
• Dylan Thomas (1957)
• Vision and Rhetoric. Studies in Modern Poetry (1959)
• Ezra Pound (1960)
• Keith Douglas. Collected Poems (Second Edition, 1966) edited with John Waller
  Sir John Waller, 7th Baronet
  Sir John Stanier Waller, 7th Baronet was an English author, poet and journalist. He was one of the group of Cairo poets during World War II...
  
   and J. C. Hall
  J. C. Hall
  J. C. Hall is a Canadian author currently writing in the fantasy genre.Hall was born in Hong Kong and educated in England. She lived and worked in Vancouver for ten years before moving to Toronto...
  
  .
• Lawrence Durrell. A Study (1968) with a bibliography by Alan G. Thomas
• Conditions (1969)
• Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse (1970)
• John Keats: Odes (1971) edited
• P. H. Newby (1974)
• Essays on Twentieth Century Poets (1977)
• Alexander Pope (1978);
• Return to Oasis: War Poems and Recollections from the Middle East, 1940-1946 (1980) edited with Victor Selwyn, Erik de Mauny, Ian Fletcher, and John Waller.
• Poems of G.S. Fraser (1981) editors Ian Fletcher and John Lucas, Leicester University Press
• A Short History of English Poetry 1981
• A Stranger and Afraid: Autobiography of an Intellectual (1983) Carcanet Press

Poets in Poetry Now (1956)

A. Alvarez - Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis

Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...

 - W. G. Archer - Patricia Avis - Bernard Bergonzi

Bernard Bergonzi

Bernard Bergonzi is a British literary scholar, critic and poet. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Warwick and an expert on T. S. Eliot.He was born in London and studied at the University of Oxford...

 - Thomas Blackburn - Arthur Boyars

Arthur Boyars

Arthur Boyars is a British poet and musicologist, who is also a translator and critic, literary editor and publisher.His Poems were published in 1944 by Fortune Press. He started the small magazine Mandrake in 1946 with John Wain while at Wadham College, Oxford, subtitled the 'An Oxford Review';...

 - Alan Brownjohn

Alan Brownjohn

Alan Charles Brownjohn FRSL is an English poet and novelist.He was born in London and educated at Merton College, Oxford. He taught until 1979, when he became a full-time writer...

 - George Bruce

George Bruce

George Bruce may refer to:*George Bruce , Two Years Before the Mast *George G. Bruce, American music author*George Barclay Bruce, British civil engineer...

 - Charles Causley

Charles Causley

Charles Stanley Causley, CBE, FRSL was a Cornish poet, schoolmaster and writer. His work is noted for its simplicity and directness and for its associations with folklore, especially when linked to his native Cornwall....

 - Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest

George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...

 - Hilary Corke

Hilary Corke

Hilary Topham Corke was a writer, composer and mineralogist...

 - Maurice James Craig - Donald Davie

Donald Davie

Donald Alfred Davie was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes.-Biography:...

 - Paul Dehn

Paul Dehn

Paul Dehn was a British screenwriter.-Biography and work:Dehn was born in 1912 in Manchester, England. He was educated at Shrewsbury School, and attended Brasenose College, Oxford...

 - Keith Douglas

Keith Douglas

Keith Castellain Douglas , was an English poet noted for his war poetry during World War II and his wry memoir of the Western Desert Campaign, Alamein to Zem Zem. He was killed during the invasion of Normandy.-Poetry:...

 - Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan...

 - D. J. Enright

D. J. Enright

Dennis Joseph Enright was a British academic, poet, novelist and critic, and general man of letters.-Life:He was born in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and educated at Leamington College and Downing College, Cambridge...

 - Iain Fletcher

Iain Fletcher

Iain Fletcher is a British television actor, best known for his role as DC Rod Skase in the ITV1 drama series The Bill. He served on the show for 9 years.Other acting credits include Family Affairs, Casualty and Doctors....

 - Roy Fuller

Roy Fuller

Roy Broadbent Fuller was an English writer, known mostly as a poet. He was born in Failsworth, Lancashire, and brought up in Blackpool. He worked as a lawyer for a building society, serving in the Royal Navy 1941-1946.Poems was his first book of poetry. He began to write fiction also in the 1950s...

 - Robert Garioch

Robert Garioch

Robert Garioch Sutherland, , was a Scottish poet and translator. His poetry was written almost exclusively in the Scots language, he was a key member in the literary revival of the language in the mid-20th century...

 - David Gascoyne

David Gascoyne

David Gascoyne was an English poet associated with the Surrealist movement.-Early life and Surrealism:...

 - Sidney Goodsir Smith - W. S. Graham

W. S. Graham

William Sydney Graham was a Scottish poet who is often associated with Dylan Thomas and the neo-romantic group of poets. Graham's poetry was mostly overlooked in his lifetime but, partly due to the support of Harold Pinter, his work has enjoyed a revival in recent years...

 - Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn, born Thomson William Gunn , was an Anglo-American poet who was praised both for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style...

 - J. C. Hall

J. C. Hall

J. C. Hall is a Canadian author currently writing in the fantasy genre.Hall was born in Hong Kong and educated in England. She lived and worked in Vancouver for ten years before moving to Toronto...

 - Michael Hamburger

Michael Hamburger

Michael Hamburger OBE was a noted British translator, poet, critic, memoirist, and academic. He was known in particular for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W. G. Sebald from German, and his work in literary criticism...

 - Jacquetta Hawkes

Jacquetta Hawkes

Jacquetta Hawkes was a British archaeologist.Born Jessie Jacquetta Hopkins, the daughter of Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, she married first Christopher Hawkes, then an Assistant Keeper at the British Museum, in 1933. From 1953, she was married to J. B. Priestley...

 - John Heath Stubbs - Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill is an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation...

 - John Holloway

John Holloway (poet)

John Holloway was an English poet, critic and academic. Born in South London and educated at the University of Oxford , he served in the artillery and intelligence during the Second World War and then pursued an academic career at the Universities of Oxford, Aberdeen and Cambridge, where he...

 - Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings was an English poet.-Life and career:Jennings was born in Boston, Lincolnshire. When she was six, her family moved to Oxford, where she remained for the rest of her life. Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, pp. 98-100. There she later attended St Anne's College...

 - Peter Johnson

Peter Johnson

Peter Robert Johnson , is a Birkenhead based business man and football investor.The son of a butcher, Johnson helped build the family business into Park Foods, the leading supplier of Christmas hampers in the early 1990s. From this base, Johnson took Tranmere Rovers from the foot of the Football...

 - Sidney Keyes

Sidney Keyes

Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes was an English poet of World War II.- Early years :Keyes was born on 27 May 1922. He attended Tonbridge School for his secondary education and later, for his tertiary, the University of Oxford...

 - Thomas Kinsella

Thomas Kinsella

Thomas Kinsella is an Irish poet, translator, editor, and publisher.-Early life and work:Kinsella was born in Lucan, County Dublin. He spent much of his childhood with relatives in rural Ireland. He was educated in the Irish language at the Model School, Inchicore and the O'Connell Christian...

 - James Kirkup

James Kirkup

James Falconer Kirkup, FRSL was a prolific English poet, translator and travel writer. He was brought up in South Shields, and educated at South Shields Secondary School and Durham University. He wrote over 30 books, including autobiographies, novels and plays...

 - Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...

 - Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee

Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter, raised in the village of Slad, and went to Marling School, Gloucestershire. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie , As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and...

 - Alun Lewis

Alun Lewis

Alun Lewis , was a poet of the Anglo-Welsh school, and is regarded by many as Britain's finest Second World War poet.- Education :...

 - Christopher Logue

Christopher Logue

Christopher Logue, CBE is an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival. He has also written for the theatre and cinema as well as acting in a number of films. His two screenplays are Savage Messiah and The End of Arthur's Marriage...

 - Rob Lyle - George MacBeth

George MacBeth

George Mann MacBeth was a Scottish poet and novelist. He was born in Shotts, Lanarkshire.When he was three, his family moved to Sheffield....

 - Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig was a Scottish poet. His poetry, in modern English, is known for its humour, simplicity of language and great popularity.-Life:...

 - Mairi MacInnes - Ewart Milne

Ewart Milne

Ewart Milne was an Irish poet who described himself on various book jackets as "a sailor before the mast, ambulance driver and courier during the Spanish Civil War, a land worker and estate manager in England during and after World War 2" and also "an enthusiast for lost causes - national,...

 - Richard Murphy

Richard Murphy (poet)

Richard Murphy is an Irish poet. He is a member of Aosdána and currently lives in Sri Lanka.-Early years:Murphy was born to an Anglo-Irish family at Milford House, near the Mayo-Galway border, in 1927...

 - Norman Nicholson

Norman Nicholson

Norman Cornthwaite Nicholson OBE, , was an English poet, known for his association with the Cumberland town of Millom...

 - Kathleen Nott

Kathleen Nott

Kathleen Cecilia Nott, FRSL, , was a British poet, novelist, critic, philosopher and editor.-Life:Kathleen Nott was born in Camberwell, London. Her father, Philip, was a lithographic printer, and her mother, Ellen, ran a boarding house in Brixton; Kathleen was their third daughter...

 - Philip Oakes - Jonathan Price

Jonathan Price

Jonathan Price is an American composer who is best known for his musical Lao Jiu and for the film scores to Cyber Wars and Rustin.- Musicals :*Escape From Eldorado , Bar Harbor, The Unusual Cabaret...

 - F. T. Prince

F. T. Prince

Frank Templeton Prince was a British poet and academic, known generally for his best-known poem Soldiers Bathing, written during the Second World War in 1942, which has been frequently included in anthologies....

 - Henry Reed - Anne Ridler

Anne Ridler

Anne Barbara Ridler OBE was a British poet, and Faber and Faber editor, selecting the Faber A Little Book of Modern Verse with T. S. Eliot . Her Collected Poems were published in 1994...

 - W. R. Rodgers

W. R. Rodgers

William Robert Rodgers , known as Bertie, and born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was probably best known as a poet, but was also a prose essayist, a book reviewer, a radio broadcaster and script writer, a lecturer and, latterly, a teacher, as well as a former Presbyterian minister.-Early life:He...

 - Alan Ross

Alan Ross

Alan John Ross, , was a British poet, writer and editor. He was born in Calcutta, India, where he spent the first seven years of his life...

 - E. J. Scovell

E. J. Scovell

Edith Joy Scovell was an English poet. She was born in Sheffield, and studied in Westmorland and at Somerville College, Oxford. She married the ecologist Charles Sutherland Elton in 1937. She also translated work of Giovanni Pascoli...

 - Tom Scott

Tom Scott (poet)

Tom Scott was a Scottish poet, editor, and prose writer. His writing is closely tied to the New Apocalypse, the New Romantics, and the Scottish Renaissance.- Bibliography :...

 - John Short - Jon Silkin

Jon Silkin

Jon Silkin was a British poet.-Early life:Jon Silkin was born in London, in a Jewish immigrant family and named after Jon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga, and attended Wycliffe College and Dulwich College During the Second World War he was one of the children evacuated from London ; he remembered that...

 - Burns Singer

Burns Singer

Burns Singer , born James Hyman Singer in New York and an American citizen all his life, was a poet usually identified as Scottish. He was brought up in Scotland from a young age, and educated in Glasgow. He had Polish, Jewish and Irish ancestry, and showed considerable interest in Polish poetry...

 - Robin Skelton

Robin Skelton

Robin Skelton was a British-born academic, writer, poet, and anthologist.Born in Easington, Yorkshire, Skelton was educated at the University of Leeds and Cambridge University. From 1944 to 1947, he served with the Royal Air Force in India. He later taught at Manchester University...

 - Martin Seymour Smith - Bernard Spencer

Bernard Spencer

Charles Bernard Spencer was an English poet, translator, and editor.He was born in Madras, India and educated at Marlborough College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Marlborough he knew John Betjeman and Louis MacNeice; at Oxford Stephen Spender, and he also came across W. H. Auden. He...

 - R. S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas

Ronald Stuart Thomas was a Welsh poet and Anglican clergyman, noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales...

 - Terence Tiller

Terence Tiller

Terence Rogers Tiller was an English poet and radio producer.-Early life:He was born in Truro, Cornwall. His early career was in medieval history at the University of Cambridge. During the World War II he taught in Cairo.-BBC:In 1946 he joined the BBC; and was a known Fitzrovian...

 - Charles Tomlinson

Charles Tomlinson

Alfred Charles Tomlinson, CBE is a British poet and translator, and also an academic and artist. He was born and raised in Penkhull in the city of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.-Life:...

 - Constantine Trypanis - John Wain

John Wain

John Barrington Wain was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group "The Movement". For most of his life, Wain worked as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio. He seems to have married in 1947, since C. S...

 - John Waller

Sir John Waller, 7th Baronet

Sir John Stanier Waller, 7th Baronet was an English author, poet and journalist. He was one of the group of Cairo poets during World War II...

 - Vernon Watkins

Vernon Watkins

Vernon Phillips Watkins , was a British poet, and a translator and painter. He was a close friend of Dylan Thomas, who described him as "the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English"....

 - Gordon Wharton

Gordon Wharton

Gordon Wharton is a British poet.He left school aged 14 and says that anything he knows now was self-taught...

 - Sheila Wingfield - Diana Witherby - David Wright

David Wright (poet)

David John Murray Wright was an author and "an acclaimed South African-born poet".-Biography:Wright was born in Johannesburg, South Africa 23 February 1920 of normal hearing....