Search Results

“... Some writers attract faint praise. Vernon Watkins is more damned by it than most: he is the serene Watkins, walking the Gower peninsula in a cloud of unworldly Christianity, Yeats and (very) late Symbolism; he is also the worthy Watkins, the man who spent his adult life working in a bank, refusing all promotion while perfecting his poetic craft ...”

“... antic paces. In such poems I am reminded of Hamburger’s friends, Edwin Muir, David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins and Robert Francis, poets whose common styles share the knowledge of what words have gone through. What such knowledge proposes is patience, certainly not the petulance in which Hamburger indulges himself when the bad humour takes him. Many of ...”

“... sprinkled throughout. Apart from Thwaite himself, the few who are spared include figures like Vernon Watkins, Gavin Ewart, Barbara Pym: allies who are genuinely liked and admired but who are nonetheless junior to Larkin in talent and repute. The really big hates tend to be reserved for sizable poetic rivals. Ted Hughes is a recurrent, near-obsessive ...”

“... Dorothy L. Sayers’s translation of and notes on Dante. He also had an influence on Sidney Keyes, Vernon Watkins, Anne Ridler and Norman Nicholson, and on the undergraduate Philip Larkin, who admired his lecturer’s novels. Victor Gollancz and L.H. Myers, both given to occult speculations, were fans of the thrillers; Dylan Thomas attended his ...”

“... a shoplifter. I think the apogee of his dreadfulness was his failure to show up at the wedding of Vernon Watkins, one of his most supportive and devoted friends, to whom he was meant to be best man. His belated letter of apology – written in what Grigson described as his ‘pre-adolescent, unpersuasive hand’ – is a document in the history of human ...”

“... He didn’t want to be marooned, but he needed a pretext to leave. His close friend, the poet Vernon Watkins, said that he would always ‘walk up to the tallest man in uniform in the pub and insult him, his country and the war so grossly that almost inevitably a fight developed’. He would do what he could to get people to get rid of him, to punish ...”

“... giving a speech and he said that Eliot wasn’t the only poet ever to work for Lloyds. Cardiff’s Vernon Watkins gave a lot of time to his writing but refused to take days off, preferring to come to his desk. Then again, the gentleman said, ‘Watkins was a branch man and Eliot was very much head office.’We stopped ...”

“... a letter dropped by the Austrians stated simply that he and his observer, 2nd Lieutenant William Watkins, had been niedergeschossen and were dead. Whether they were killed instantly or died of wounds is unclear. In October 1918 two periodicals devoted to the new art of aviation, the Aeroplane and Flight, reported that Fernald had ‘died as a prisoner in ...”