Patric Dickinson is more widely known for his frequent poetry broadcasts on BBC Radio Three and for his translations from Vergil and Aristophanes than for his own verse. A careful lyricist whose work remains outside the main directions taken by postwar British poets, Dickinson shares his closest affinities with those writers of the 1930s and the early 1940s who, inspired by Yeats, felt themselves continuing an English romantic tradition. A great promoter of English poetry, he has been an active editor and anthologist.

Patric Thomas Dickinson was born in Nasirabad, India, into a military family. His father, Arthur Thomas Dickinson, was killed early in World War I, and his mother, Eileen Kirwan Dickinson, returned to England, settling in Hampshire on the South Coast,initially at Petersfield and later at Brockenhurst. It is to this period of "the long bereavement in England," Dickinson states, that his early life belongs...