Vernon Watkins (1906–1967)

One of the leading Welsh poets of the twentieth century, Vernon Watkins came from the town of Maesteg, in South Wales. After a series of preparatory schools, he enrolled in Magdalene College, Cambridge, and then withdrew because he felt the intellectual atmosphere threatened his poetry. He returned mostra altro to Wales, where his father---a branch manager at Lloyd's Bank---got him a job as cashier. During a mental collapse, he experienced a religious vision that provided the ground of much of his later verse. Refusing promotion because it would distract him from poetry, Watkins continued as cashier until retirement from the bank. During World War II, he served first in the home guard and then as a police officer in the Royal Air Force. In the 1960s, he taught poetry both at the University of Washington and at Swansea University, in his native Wales. Watkins did not publish his first book until his thirty-fifth year. His verse avoids topical subjects (except for tributes to W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas) in favor of religious or mystical ones, often set in the Welsh countryside. Watkins's particular vision fuses Christian and neo-Platonic traditions in a way that has led critics like Kathleen Raine to value him highly. Influenced early by William Blake and later by Yeats, he belongs in the ranks of romantic moderns. The most important contemporary poet to Watkins was his great friend Dylan Thomas, whom he met in 1935 and who persuaded Watkins to let his work be published. Watkins also did verse translations, especially of Heinrich Heine. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno