 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(February 2019) |
Nicholas Snowdon Willey also spelt Nicholas Snowden Willey [1] (1946-2011) was an English poet.
Contents
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(February 2019) |
Nicholas Snowdon Willey also spelt Nicholas Snowden Willey [1] (1946-2011) was an English poet.
Nicholas Snowdon Willey was born in London on 21 February 1946, to Fred Willey [2] and Eleanor née Snowdon. Fred Willey was Labour Party MP for Sunderland North in the 1945 Labour Government. Both parents came from County Durham. He was educated at University College School, Hampstead, and later at King Alfred School. He started writing poetry at an early age, an activity which continued until his death.
In 1962 at the age of sixteen he had the first of a series of serious depressions, and spent most of that year in hospital. The illness was never to be far away throughout his life.
Willey's work was included in the seminal anthology of beat poets by Michael Horovitz, Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain . His work however does not (as he himself considered) lend itself usefully to definition beyond that of poetry itself. He had a profound understanding of the sonorous meaning of poetry, and was a fine reader of his work. A small number of recordings of him are held in the British Library.
The earliest publication of his poetry was The Green Tunnel (Signals Press 1965), [2] [1] a hard-back collection of twenty poems including one especially written to celebrate a London exhibition by Takis entitled "L'espace Interieur". A pamphlet of seven poems, Seven Poems (Villiers Press 1974) also appeared, and both publications are now unobtainable. His poems also appeared regularly in a number of magazines, including Encounter magazine and more recently Ambit . A collection of forty of his early poems, "Liminal Green", (Light Touch Publications 2019) with a CD of readings by Joss Wynne Evans is recently published.
In June 1969 the BBC Third Programme transmitted a reading of Willey's poetry entitled "The Living Poet - Nicholas Willey" introduced by Hallam Tennyson.
In 1973, he met his future wife Sarah at a time when he had been working happily for quite a long period at the Play Library at the BBC. Upon marriage they moved to the West Country eventually settling in a cottage in Wiltshire. There were two children of the marriage, a son, Matt, born in Bristol 1974 and a daughter, Jane born in Bath, Somerset 1977. Also during that period he took a degree in Philosophy at Bristol University.
In later years Willey worked with deaf and blind adults, and also for several years with young adults with learning difficulties.
He died of cancer on 20 November 2011.
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers.
Robert White Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Buffalo, and Providence, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
"The British Poetry Revival" is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry. The poets included an older generation - Bob Cobbing, Paula Claire, Tom Raworth, Eric Mottram, Jeff Nuttall, Andrew Crozier, Lee Harwood, Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair—and a younger generation: Paul Buck, Bill Griffiths, John Hall, John James, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton, Peter Finch, Ulli Freer, Ken Edwards, Robert Gavin Hampson, Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clarke, Clive Fencott, Maggie O'Sullivan, Cris Cheek, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley.
Gael Turnbull was a Scottish poet who was an important figure in the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 1970s.
Sir Geoffrey William Hill, FRSL was 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 and was called the "greatest living poet in the English language." From 2010 to 2015 he held the position of Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Following his receiving the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2009 for his Collected Critical Writings, and the publication of Broken Hierarchies , Hill is recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry and criticism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, an anthology of poetry, was edited by Michael Horovitz and published by Penguin Books in 1969. According to Martin Booth it was "virtually a manifesto of New Departures doctrine and dogma".
Waldo Goronwy Williams was one of the leading Welsh-language poets of the 20th century. He was also a notable Christian pacifist, anti-war campaigner, and Welsh nationalist. He is often referred to by his first name only.
William Lewis is an English artist, story-teller, poet and mythographer. He was a founder-member of The Medway Poets and of the Stuckists art group.
Larry Patrick Levis was an American poet.
John Sleigh Pudney was a British poet, journalist and author. He was known especially for his popular poetry written during the Second World War, but he also wrote novels, short stories and children's fiction. His broad-ranging non-fiction, often commissioned, served as his primary source of income.
Peter Robinson is a British poet born in Salford, Lancashire.
Jean Adam was a Scottish poet from the labouring classes; her best-known work is "There's Nae Luck Aboot The Hoose". In 1734 she published a volume of her poetry entitled Miscellany poems, but the cost of shipping a substantial number to the British colony of Boston in North America, where they did not sell well, forced her to turn first to teaching and then to domestic labour. She died penniless in Glasgow's Town's Hospital poorhouse at the age of sixty.
Gwyn Thomas was a Welsh poet and academic. He was a National Poet of Wales.
Salena Godden is an English poet, author, activist, broadcaster, memoirist and essayist.
Edmund Skellings was an American poet. He was the Poet Laureate of Florida from 1980 to 2012, and was succeeded by Peter Meinke.
Evan Evans was a Welsh-language poet, clergyman, antiquary and literary critic.
Fred Johnston is an Irish poet, novelist, literary critic and musician. He is the founder and current director of the Western Writers' Centre in Galway. He co-founded the Irish Writers' Co-operative in 1974, and founded Galway's annual Cúirt International Festival of Literature in 1986.
Nicholas Freeston was an English poet who spent most of his working life as a weaver in cotton mills near his home in Clayton-le-Moors, Lancashire. He published five books of poetry, occasionally writing in Lancashire dialect, and won fifteen awards including a gold medal presented by the president of the United Poets' Laureate International. He was listed in the third edition of Who's Who in the World and appeared on television and radio reading his own work. A UK national newspaper, the Daily Mirror, called him the "Cotton Mill Bard" and the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, the "Wordsworth of the Weaving Shed".
Yvonne Green is an English poet, translator, writer and barrister.
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Scholars regard the publishing of William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as probably the beginning of the movement, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end. Romanticism arrived in other parts of the English-speaking world later; in America, it arrived around 1820.
