Middleton, Christopher, 1926-....

English poet, essayist, translator, and educator.

Christopher Middleton, poet, essayist, and translator, was born June 10, 1926, in Truro, Cornwall, England. He attended Merton College at Oxford, where he earned his B. A. degree in 1951 and his D. Phil. in 1954. He lectured in English literature at Zurich University from 1952 to 1955 before accepting a lectureship at King's College, University of London. In 1966, Middleton accepted a professorship at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Germanic Language, where he still teaches.

Among Middleton's published books of poetry, there are Poems (1944), Nocturne in Eden (1945), Torse 3 (1962), Nonsequences (1965), Our Flowers & Nice Bones (1969), The Lonely Suppers of W. V. Balloon (1975), Pataxanadu and Other Prose (1977), and Carminalenia (1980). Middleton's essays are collected in the volumes Bolshevism in Art and Other Expository Writings (1978) and The Pursuit of the Kingfisher (1983). Middleton's translations of German literature include Robert Walser's The Walk and Other Stories (1957) and Jakob von Gunten (1969), Hugo von Hofmannstahl's Poems and Verse Plays (1961), Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (1969), Selected Poems of Hölderlin and Mörike (1972), and Elias Canetti's Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice (1974), as well as translations of the works of Gottfried Benn, Paul Celan, Günter Grass, Gerd Hofmann, and Christa Wolf. In addition, Middleton wrote the libretto for Hans Vogt's opera, The Metropolitans (1964).