Jon Stallworthy (Jon Howie Stallworthy) Biography

British poet, biographer, editor, and critic, born in London, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize in 1958. He was John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University, New York, until 1977, when he became a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. The Astronomy of Love (1961), his first collection of poetry, displays the highly developed technical accomplishment that is a constant feature of his work. Subsequent volumes include Out of Bounds (1963), Root and Branch (1969), Hand in Hand (1974), and A Familiar Tree (1978); a selected edition containing many previously uncollected poems was published as The Anzac Sonata in 1986. Much of his verse displays the vividness of his historical imagination, which issues in a finely detailed account of his family's history from the mid-eighteenth century in the sequence entitled ‘The Marquesas’. The balanced fusion of description and contemplation characterizing many poems is exemplified by ‘Toulouse Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge’. Stallworthy is widely known for his work on Wilfred Owen, whose biography he published to considerable acclaim in 1974. He is the editor of the definitive edition of Owen's poetry, The Complete Poems and Fragments of 1983; the elegiac ‘Goodbye Wilfred Owen’ is one of the finest of his short poems. He has since published the much praised biography of Louis MacNeice (1995). Among his other works are the critical studies Vision and Revision in Yeats's ‘Last Poems’ (1969) and Poets of the First World War (1974).