Name W. Ker | Role Essayist | |
 | ||
Died July 17, 1923, Piedmont, Italy Education University of Glasgow, Balliol College, The Glasgow Academy Books Essays on medieval literature, The Dark Ages, Medieval English Literature, The Dark Ages Volume 1, On the Philosophy of History | ||
William Paton Ker (usually referred to as W. P. Ker; 30 August 1855 – 17 July 1923) was a Scottish literary scholar and essayist.
Contents
Life
He was born in Glasgow in 1855. He studied at Glasgow Academy, the University of Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford.
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. He was the Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1920 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."