John Collings Squire

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Sir John Collings Squire (born April 2, 1884 in Plymouth , Devon , † December 20, 1958 in Rushlake Green , Sussex ), JC Squire for short , was a British poet , writer , historian and influential literary critic .

Life

John Collings Squire was born in Plymouth . He studied at St John's College (Cambridge) , where he developed an interest in literature and politics. After graduating, Squire became a parliamentary reporter for the National Press Agency . His first literary works were poems and translations by Charles Baudelaire . For his next books, Squire used his experiences in the UK Parliament and wrote hugely popular parodies such as Imaginary Speeches (1912) and Steps to Parnassus (1913).

He developed into a nationally known journalist and literary critic. In 1913 Squire wrote a number of critical essays and took over the literary editorial office at the New Statesman . As a poet, he is best known for his work The Survival of the Fittest (1916), one of the first collections of poetry to protest against the First World War. His works were included in the volumes Georgian Poetry published by Edward Marsh (volumes 1916–1917, 1918–1919, 1920–1922). As editor of the magazine London Mercury (1919–1934) he had a decisive influence on British literature and was a member of the jury on the committee for the award of the Hawthornden Prize , the oldest literary prize in Great Britain.

Squire had joined the Social Democratic Federation as a young man . In the general election of 1918, however, he ran as a Labor Party MP for the seat of Cambridge University . He later sympathized for a short time with the ideas of Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists , but, according to the historian Charles Petrie, "found the atmosphere to be inappropriate".

On July 12, 1933 he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor ("Sir").

His collected poems with an introduction by John Betjeman were published posthumously in 1959.

literature

  • Patrick Howarth: Squire. Hutchinson, 1963.
  • Williams Iolo Aneurin: John Collings Squire and James Stephens. BiblioBazaar, 2009.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ P. Moeyes: Siegfried Sassoon. Scorched Glory. A critical study. Springer, 1997, p. 151.
  2. ↑ a b c J. C. Squire Poetry Foundation, accessed January 30, 2019
  3. ^ Charles Petrie: A Historian Looks at His World . Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd., 1972, p. 115.
  4. ↑ Martin Pugh: Hurray For The Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain between the Wars. Random House , Pimlico, 2006, p. 146.
  5. ^ Alfred William Brian Simpson: In the Highest Degree Odious. Clarendon Press, 1994, p. 57.
  6. ↑ Knights and Dames at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
personal data
SURNAME Squire, John Collings
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British poet, writer and historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 2, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Plymouth
DATE OF DEATH December 20, 1958
Place of death Rushlake Green , Sussex