Ronald Bottrall

(Francis James) Ronald Bottrall OBE, (2 September 1906, Camborne, Cornwall – 25 June 1989) was a Cornish poet. He was praised highly by Anthony Burgess and Martin Seymour-Smith, and deprecated by Ian Hamilton and Martin Amis.

Life

Bottrall was educated at Redruth Grammar School and at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He held notable international academic posts before and during World War II. From 1929 to 1931, he taught in Helsinki. In 1931, he published his first collection of poetry,The Loosening and other Poems, a book heavily influenced by the work of Ezra Pound. Bottrall then spent two years working in the United States.

Publications Poetry The Loosening and other Poems, 1931 Festivals of Fire, 1934 The Turning Path, 1939 Farewell and Welcome, 1945 Selected Poems, 1946 The Palisades of Fear, 1949 Adam Unparadised, 1954 Collected Poems, 1961 Day and Night, 1974 Poems 1955–73, 1974 Reflections on the Nile, 1980 Against a Setting Sun, 1983

Other (with Gunnar Ekelöf) T.S. Eliot: Dikter i Urval, 1942 (with Margaret Bottrall) The Zephyr Book of English Verse, 1945 (with Margaret Bottrall) Collected English Verse, 1946 Rome (Art Centres of the World), 1968.