Ronald Duncan Biography

British poet and dramatist, born in Salisbury, Rhodesia, educated at Cambridge University. He gained wide recognition for the verse-drama This Way to the Tomb (1946), a ‘masque and anti-masque’ with music by Benjamin Britten, for whose opera The Rape of Lucretia (1946) he supplied a libretto; Collected Plays appeared in 1971. He was among the founders of the English Stage Company in 1956. As a poet he displayed a high level of conventional accomplishment in modes ranging from humorous verse to philosophically ambitious meditations. Collections of his work include The Mongrel (1950) and For the Fear (1977); Collected Poems was published in 1981. He produced three volumes of provocative and entertaining autobiography, All Men Are Islands (1964), How To Make Enemies (1968), and Obsessed (1977).