Andrew Young (Andrew John Young) Biography

British poet, born in Elgin, Moray; he grew up in Edinburgh, where he was educated at the University. In 1912 he was ordained in the Free Church of Scotland and became an Anglican minister in 1939. He was made a Canon of Chichester Cathedral in 1948. Songs of Night (1910), his first collection of verse, was succeeded by numerous volumes, including Memorial Verses (1918), a long elegy of great accomplishment for a friend killed in the war. Many of his brief, contemplatively descriptive poems of the 1920s exemplify the style of the Georgian poets (see Georgian poetry), with whom he is generally associated. In 1931, however, he disclaimed as immature all his work preceding the appearance of Winter Harvest in that year. His later poetry makes striking use of precisely observed natural imagery to convey his belief in the transcendental aspects of the physical world. Among his subsequent collections are Speak to the Earth (1939) and The Green Man (1947). His most remarkable work is Out of the World and Back (1958), which forms a highly imaginative treatment of his conceptions of the afterlife. A Poetical Works (1985), edited by E. Lowbury and A. Young, is a collected edition of his poetry. His other publications include A Prospect of Flowers (1945), one of the products of his keen interest in botany, and the critical work The Poet and the Landscape (1962).