O Wyoming Whipporwill

Claire Harman

• The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker by Robert Fraser
  Cape, 573 pp, £25.00, February 2002, ISBN 0 224 06242 5

Fame came early to George Barker, but not so early as to take him by surprise. He designed his own ‘crypto-Renaissance catafalque’ at the age of 13, just to be on the safe side, and a year later was writing in these sophisticated terms of his own literary strengths and weaknesses:

I am certain that my mind is made if anything for self-contained imaginative work: critical activity of any kind is alien to me, alien and dissonant. The values structuring a critical work must be either impersonal or strange; the individuality of the critic, except emotionally, is to be nullified. Such nullification I cannot affect. Either I am without an important analytical intelligence, or my imagination is monstrously oversize.