Roy Fuller (Roy Broadbent Fuller) Biography

British poet, born at Failsworth in Lancashire, educated at Blackpool High School. An articled clerk from the age of 16, in 1934 he qualified as a solicitor, practising with a building society throughout his career. He was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1968 to 1973. In the later 1930s he was a contributor to New Verse, producing poetry of social and political concern which indicated the influences of Auden and Spender. His early collections The Middle of a War (1942) and A Lost Season (1944) contain many poems memorable for their reflections of wartime atmospheres of loneliness, tedium, and fear. These volumes establish the contemplative detachment and urbanely ironic tone that predominate in much of Fuller's later writing. His numerous subsequent collections include Brutus's Orchard (1958), Tiny Tears (1973), and Available for Dreams (1989). Collected Poems: 1936–1961 was published in 1962. Fuller's technical accomplishment is evident throughout his poetry, which makes fluent use of a wide range of traditional forms and innovative variations upon them. He also published a number of novels, among which are the imaginatively disquieting Fantasy and Fugue (1954) and Image of a Society (1956), which portrays personal interactions within a northern building society. Fuller's three volumes of memoirs, Souvenirs (1980), Vamp Till Ready (1982), and Home and Dry (1984) appeared under the title of The Strange and the Good in 1989. A further work of autobiography, Spanner and Pen, was published in 1991.