Vernon Watkins
Vernon Watkins, who died on 8 October while visiting professor of English literature at the Uni- versity of Washington, Seattle, was one of the most distinguished poets of our time. He was born in Carmarthenshire in 1906, was educated at Rep- ton and Magdalene College, Cambridge, and until his retirement last year worked in Lloyd's Bank in Swansea. The poetry of this shy, retiring, most likeable man was intensely personal, almost Wordsworthian, a poetry celebrating the infinite complexity of man and of nature, a poetry often rooted in Welsh legend, place and history. Both Yeats and Rilke were major influences.
He had published over half a dozen volumes of poetry, his translations of Heine give ample evi- dence of his love of German literature, while the published letters of Dylan Thomas to Vernon Watkins show in a unique manner how these two friends, so different in temperament and poetic expression, shared an intense devotion to their craft. I visited him a few days before last Christ- mas, walking along the cliff path to his home on Penard Cliffs; he knew every yard of the Gower slades with the precision of a naturalist. His study, with its books and photographs of Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats in Dublin, looked out to Shire- combe and Oxwich Point, above those sheer lime- stone cliffs, where, as he wrote in Taliesin in Gower, 'Rhinoceros, bear and reindeer haunt the crawling glacier of age/Beheld in the eye of the rock. .. That is how one will remember him.—D. R.
Previous page
