William Paton Ker

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Paton Ker (usually referred to as "W.P. Ker"; August 30, 1855 - July 17, 1923) was a Scottish literary scholar and essayist.

W.P. Ker

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 while hill-climbing in Europe. A W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture is held at Glasgow University in his honour.

He is referred to repeatedly, with affection and respect in J.R.R. Tolkien's famous essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," and it is likely this lecture which W.H. Auden refers to in offering his own tribute:

(after describing how "surrending to his immediate desire" a poet may do the best thing he could have done: he attended a lecture delivered by Tolkien. He remembers not a single word, but at a certain point Tolkien recited a long passage from Beowulf. If not for that he would not have been driven to read and be strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry):

"But this was something which neither I nor anybody else could have forseen. Again, 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." (Page 42, The Dyer's hand and other essays, "Making, Knowing, and Judging,").