Spotlight on Neglected Worth: W. P. Ker

To wish to be someone else is to wish to cease to be, and I cannot say that I wish that there were an end to John Breithaupt, the person who I am. But when I read the scholarly works of W. P. Ker (1855 – 1923) and read about his life, I envy him his being who he was.

Ker was fortunate above most mortals in being able to do the thing he loved all his adult life, without distraction or financial anxiety. This was, to study the western world’s poetry and stories and write about them engagingly. He once described his calling as “a pleasant duty that I have been chosen as one of the captains of a band of adventurers whose province is the ocean of stories, the fortunate Isles of Romance, the kingdoms of wonder beyond the furthest voyage of the Argo.”

He was born in Glasgow and educated in Scotland and at Oxford University. He was trained to be a classicist but his interests turned to European literature of the period between end of the classical world and the start of the renaissance, or roughly 500 to 1500 A. D. He read widely and always in the original languages; his learning was said to surpass even that of the polymathic critic George Saintsbury.

His first book, Epic and Romance, was published when he was 42; it established him as the leading scholar in this field. The publication of this book was followed by many honors, including an appointment as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a position whose only requirement is that the occupant deliver three lectures on poetry a year. Oxford then elected him a fellow of All Souls College, where he was a don without students, his only duty being that he spend a certain amount of time in the college each year. This was a lifetime appointment.

Ker had his limitations, of course; he was not himself a creative writer; his prose was clear and readable, but not distinguished; and in most cases he was content merely to quote poems rather than analyze them. But his love for and insight into what he read lifted what he wrote above the level of routine scholarship.

W. H. Auden wrote eloquently about his debt to Ker:

what good angel glured me into Blackwell’s one afternoon and, from such a wilderness of volumes, picked out for me the essays of W. P. Ker? No other critic whom I have subsequently read could have granted me the same vision of a kind of literary All Souls Night in which the dead, the living and the unborn writers of every age and tongue were seen as engaged upon a common, noble and civilizing task. No other could have so instantaneously aroused in me a fascination with prosody, which I have never lost.

He was fortunate in living in a time when a life devoted to the study of poetry and stories was not thought to require justification. He once wrote, however, that

Imagination and the pure delight in stories drive out fear.

He was reticent about his religious beliefs, but once, when he was out walking with a student, he pointed to a bird snd said, “There is a woodcock.”

”That’s not my idea of a woodcock,”:the student replied.

Ker replied, “It’s God’s idea”

I have copies of several of his books: Epic and Romance, The Dark Ages, Form and Style in Poetry, and Medieval English Literature. I haven’t read any of them straight through. I leave them around the house where I can pick them up and read five or ten pages at whim. They have the merit of all the best criticism, in making you put down the criticism and take up the originals. In this case, though, a caveat is in order: a sudden passion for Boethius can be disruptive of your life’s ordinary routines..