Vernon Watkins: Muse, Fountain and Poet

Historical Perspectives

Historical Perspectives a Scottish-based postgraduate ran network, fostering discussions on historical-based research by PGR students.

This session in our 2022/2023 seminar series features one speaker. In Vernon Watkins and the Bardic Tradition (1964), Kathleen Raine outlined the poet’s deliberate choice to reject modernity and embrace tradition. In the 1920s, Vernon Watkins dropped out of Cambridge to pursue his singular vocation as a poet. His ‘clear-sightedness in making a choice by which, from a worldly point of view, he lost so much and gained so little,’ writes Kathleen Raine, ‘demonstrates not only his integrity but his intelligence’. She continues: ‘Perhaps he understood even then that tradition has more to give a poet than education has’. Vernon Watkins ‘chose tradition […] [and] remained true, as Yeats said poets must, to ‘certain heroic and religious truths, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned’.’ Today, the poetry of Vernon Watkins—which bridges the gap between the modern and the ancient—through the image of the eternal fountain (‘The fountain, what is it? What is ancient, what is fresh’), ‘demands some [new] commentary on the grounds that its ultimate concerns are far removed from both contemporary poetry’s and perhaps poetry reader’s expectations’. This new talk would present the largely forgotten poetry of Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) in the context of his extraordinary life, which encompasses nearly the full span of the twentieth-century – and how he bridged the gap between tradition and modernity – through his poetic friendships with Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin.Benjamin Davies is a first year PhD student in Creative Writing at Swansea University, working under the supervision of the poet Owen Sheers, Professor in Creativity at Swansea University. He is developing a new drama about the life and work of the Welsh poet Vernon Phillips Watkins (1906-1967). He holds an MA in English from the University of St Andrews and an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Durham University. In 2021, he was awarded a distinction for his Master’s dissertation on Watkins’ use of the Welsh bard Taliesin in a paper called Vernon Watkins: Taliesin and The Influences.To find out more about Historical Perspectives, find us on social media, or at our website 	https://histperspectives.wordpress.com

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Vernon Watkins: Muse, Fountain and Poet

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Vernon Watkins: Muse, Fountain and Poet

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