Berry, Francis

Francis Berry, poet and professor of literature, was born March 23, 1915, in Ipoh, Malaya. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of London in 1947; upon completion of his undergraduate studies, Berry obtained a lectureship in English at the University of Sheffield and was promoted to a professorship by 1960, the year he received his M.A. from the University of Exeter. From 1970 to 1980, he taught at Royal Holloway College of the University of London from which he retired professor emeritus. Various visiting professorships took him to Carleton College in Minnesota, to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, to India and to Japan as a British Council Lecturer, to the University of Glasgow, to the Australian National University in Canberra, and to the University of Malawi. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1968.

Francis Berry's poetic works include Gospel of Fire (1933), Snake in the Moon (1936), The Iron Christ (1938), Fall of a Tower and Other Poems (1943), Murdock and Other Poems (1947), The Galloping Centaur (1952), Morant Bay and Other Poems (1961), Ghosts of Greenland (1966), and From the Red Fort (1984). Berry has also written radio plays such as Illnesses and Ghosts at the West Settlement (1965), The Sirens (1966), The Near Singing Dome (1971; revised as The Singing Dome, published 1984), and Eyre Remembers (1982), and has published one novel, I Tell of Greenland (1977). His Collected Poems was published in 1994.

Berry's critical works include Herbert Read (1953; revised 1961), Poets' Grammar: Person, Time and Mood in Poetry (1958), Poetry and the Physical Voice (1962), and The Shakespeare Inset: Word and Picture (1965; revised 1971). Two of his lectures, John Masefield: The Narrative Poet (1968) and Thoughts on Poetic Time (1972), have also been published. He edited issue 22 of Essays and Studies in 1969 and contributed essays and reviews to various publications throughout his career.

From the guide to the Francis Berry Papers TXRC94-A21., ca. 1928-1961, (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)