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| Roy Fuller |
This month, we publish the Selected Poems of Roy Fuller, Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1968 to 1973. Here, he is remembered by his son, the poet John Fuller.Born in 1912, and having been articled to a firm of solicitors since the age of sixteen when he left school, he had already completed a volume of poems as early as September 1934, which he submitted to the Hogarth Press (‘Their merit and originality are considerable,’ said Leonard Woolf).
His eventual first collection had appeared in 1939. Even by then, the poems of his first political period had been largely replaced by poems from his surrealist period. The traumas of war effectively encouraged an approach quite different from either of these somewhat programmed modes. This was to tell the truth as he saw it, either in the light of the most credible and adaptable ideas of historians, philosophers and scientists, or simply as it occurred to him in the circumstances of common daily life. It is in this area, where ideas and feelings luminously encounter each other, that most of his best work continues to be found.
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Roy Fuller in naval
uniform, 1941 |
As I grew up, I of course got to know my father’s work pretty well, almost as it appeared. I read that novel ‘
for Teen Agers’ at the age of twelve; fed him on holiday with similes which he then inserted into a poem, with a charming acknowledgement; collaborated with him on French translations and an abortive play; and in the middle of my teens started to write poems myself. I have never known whether this early closeness has made me a privileged or partial judge of his work. We always read and commented on each other’s poems, and in due course, when my own interests were established, our criticisms were blessedly free from flattery or offence. His advice was of infinite technical benefit to me, coming as it did from such a tender, generous and humorous man. I could not have had a better father.
-- John Fuller.
The full text is published in the Preface of Roy Fuller's Selected Poems, released this month by Carcanet.
Roy Fuller's poem, 'My Life' was chosen for the Saturday Poem in the Guardian
on 27 January. Click here to read the poem.
