Cameron, Norman, 1905-1953

(John) Norman Cameron, the poet and translator, was born in 1905 in India and educated at Fettes and Oriel College, Oxford, where he read Classics. He published poems in The Fettesian and Oxford Poetry, as well as New Verse . During the 1930s he worked for some years in the Colonial Service in Nigeria, then as an advertising copy-writer in London. His only original collection of poetry to be published during his lifetime, The Winter House, appeared in 1935. He was also a notable translator, of Rimbaud and Villon and much French prose, including Candide, Cousin Pons, and Stendhal's letters. During the Second World War he became a propagandist, notably in Italy. His Collected Poems, with an introduction by his close friend Robert Graves, did not appear until 1957, four years after his death in 1953, and his Complete Poems did not appear until 1985.

From the guide to the Letters by or about Norman Cameron, with photocopies of drafts of four of his poems, 1940-1971, (Leeds University Library)