I think him to be the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English.
Vernon Phillips Watkins (1906–1967) was born in South Wales. He attended Magdalene College, Cambridge and served on the Royal Air Force between 1941 and 1946. He received many awards, including the Levinson Prize in 1953 and the Guinness Poetry Prize in 1957 for The Tributary Seasons.
Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was born in Maesteg, South Wales. He was a part of the cryptography team that broke the enigma code. After the war he spent most of his career as a cashier at Lloyds Bank in Cardiff but published eight books of poetry during his lifetime. Fidelities was written while he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and was published posthumously. His close friends included W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas, and Kathleene Raine, who called him “the greatest lyric poet of my generation.” Watkins was being considered for poet laureate at the time of his death.
Before his death, Dylan Thomas said of Vernon Watkins, “I think him to be the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English.” Since that time Watkins has published a series of distinguished volumes which have brought him to the forefront of contemporary English poets. This paperback selection is designed to bring the work of Vernon Watkins to the wide audience which it so well merits. The choice of poems has been made by the poet himself and is drawn from five earlier books, covering the period 1930-1960. (It replaces the hardbound Selected Poems which New Directions published in 1918.)
I think him to be the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English.
Vernon Watkins is very consciously a Romantic, in a decade in which younger poets have, on the whole, turned against Romanticism… He is a poet who has created his own recognizable world; and who, in an age in love with ambiguity and hedging can declare with obvious dignity, ‘Truth is simple.’
