Steve Ellis Biography

British poet and critic, born in York, educated at University College, London, gaining his Ph.D. in 1981 for a thesis which provided the basis for his first critical work, Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T. S. Eliot (1983). In 1984 he took up an academic post at the University of Birmingham. His poetry, collected in Home and Away (1987) and West Pathway (1993), is notable for its lyrically incisive views of the unsettling implications of everyday events; long sociocultural perspectives are opened in the course of shrewd considerations of modestly anecdotal material. Samples of his work are included in the popular anthology Poetry with an Edge (1988, edited by Neil Astley). He completed a verse translation of Dante's Hell in 1991. The English Eliot: Design, Language, and Landscape in Four Quartets (1991) is a notable work of criticism.