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British poet From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stephen Romer, FRSL (born 1957) is an English poet, academic and literary critic.
Stephen Romer | |
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| Born | 1957 England |
| Alma mater | Trinity Hall, Cambridge |
| Occupation(s) | Poet, lecturer, literary critic |
Stephen Romer was born in Hertfordshire, England in 1957 and educated at Radley College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. After a year spent in the US, on a Henry Fellowship at Harvard (1978–79), he began work on his PhD, and was awarded a bursary to study at the British Institute in Paris. In 1981 he moved to France, where he taught English at the British Institute, the American University in Paris and at Paris X-Nanterre, before becoming Maître de Conférences (senior lecturer) in the English department at Tours where he still teaches.[1][2] He has been three times O’Connor Visiting Professor in Romance Languages at Colgate University (New York). Romer now divides him time between Tours and Oxford, where he is currently Stipendiary Lecturer in French at Brasenose College.[3] He has been Visiting Fellow at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge (2003), and in Oxford at All Souls (2010), Saint Anne’s (2015), Christ Church (Fowler-Hamilton VF, 2016). In 2017 he was appointed Royal Literary Fund Fellow for two years at Worcester College, and then served as RLF Fellow for a further two years at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011 and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2021.[4]
Romer’s first full collection was Idols published by Oxford University Press in 1986, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Subsequent collections include Plato’s Ladder (OUP, 1992), a Poetry Book Society Choice ; Tribute (OUP, 1998) ; Yellow Studio (Carcanet/Oxford Poets 2008), PBS recommendation. Set Thy Love in Order, his New & Selected poems, was published by Carcanet in 2017. Two collections of his poetry have appeared in French : Tribut (Le Temps qu’il fait, 2007) and Le Fauteuil jaune (Le Bruit du temps, 2021),[5] translated by Antoine Jaccottet, Gilles Ortlieb, Paul de Roux and Valérie Rouzeau. His poems have also appeared in Italian, Polish and Spanish translation.[6]
Stephen Romer has been active as critic, editor and translator. His 20th Century French Poems was published by Faber and Faber in 2002. Into the Deep Street : 7 Modern French Poets (1938-2008), co-translated with Jennie Feldman, (Anvil, 2009) won Special Commendation for the Popescu Prize 2009. He has contributed translations to many anthologies including The Yale Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, ed. M-A Caws, (2002) and French Poetry : from Medieval to Modern Times, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Dent Everyman, 2017). He has translated widely from French poetry, mostly modern and contemporary (Jean Follain, Philippe Jaccottet, Paul de Roux, Gilles Ortlieb and Valérie Rouzeau), but also from the Iambes of André Chénier, and from the war poetry of Apollinaire.
Over the years, Romer has produced editions and translations of Yves Bonnefoy, widely considered the major French post-war poet and thinker. These include The Arrière-pays, Bonnefoy’s celebrated spiritual and aesthetic autobiography, (Seagull, 2012), and The Red Scarf, the poet’s final prose memoir, (Seagull, 2020). With John Naughton and Anthony Rudolf, Romer co-edited the major collection of Bonnefoy now available in English, the two-volume Carcanet Reader. He was lead editor and provided a substantial analytic introduction for the volume Prose (Carcanet, 2020).
As a product of his interest in the foundations of Franco-British Modernism, Romer edited and translated French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics, 2013), an anthology of short stories from the era of so-called Décadence, including writers like Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Guy de Maupassant, Octave Mirbeau, Léon Bloy, Marcel Schwob, Jean Lorrain, Catulle Mendès, Jean Richepin and Pierre Louÿs.
Pursuing an academic career, Romer has contributed numerous chapters to edited books, notably on Pierre Reverdy, Paul Valéry, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and articles to learned journals (Essays in Criticism, Etudes anglaises). He has written criticism for The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, London Magazine, PN Review, Poetry Review and others. He edited a selection from the poet Robert Herrick, for Faber’s ‘poet to poet’ series (Faber, 2010).
A selection of his essays was published in 2024 under the title Chaos and the Clean Line.
As early as in 1996 Romer's early writings were favourably cited in an entry of The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English : "Derek Mahon's 'commendation of Romer's emotional candour and intellectual clarity' summarizes the essential qualities of his work. Plato's Ladder further demonstrates his ability to express intimate and intense personal experience while retaining the impress of a complex and erudite sensibility'.[7] Four years later Romer was also among Routledge's Who's Who in Twentieth-Century World Poetry.[8] Romer eventually became the youngest writer of a 2005 Anthologie Bilingue de la Poésie Anglaise by the prestigious French publishing house Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.[9] In 2022 he was also included in L'Île Rebelle, another Gallimard poetry anthology.[10]
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