George Barker

George Barker (George Granville Barker), 1913-91, English poet, b. Essex, England. He has taught in Japan and the United States as well as in England. His highly dramatic poems, often concerned with themes of remorse and pain, led critics to place him—perhaps misleadingly—among the "New Apocalypse" movement. Barker's published works include 30 Preliminary Poems (1933), Eros in Dogma (1944), News of the World (1950), The True Confession of George Barker (1950), The View From a Blind I (1962), Thurgarton Church (1969), The Alphabetical Zoo (1972), and Collected Poems (1987).

Barker, George Granville (1913–91), poet, born in Essex, whose volumes include Thirty Preliminary Poems (1933); Poems (1935); Calamiterror (1937, a semi-political poem inspired by the Spanish Civil War); Lament and Triumph (1940); Eros in Dogma (1944); and Collected Poems 1930–1965 (1965). Barker's earlier work is characteristically rhetorical, Dionysiac, and surreal; a neo-Romantic associated with the New Apocalypse, and a self-styled ‘Augustinian anarchist’, he has a marked penchant for puns, distortion, and abrupt changes of tone. His True Confession of George Barker (1950, augmented 1965) presents the poet as irreverent, defiant, offhand, Rabelaisian, and guilt-ridden at once. Its later stanzas, and works such as Villa Stellar (1978) and the long title-poem of Anno Domini (1983), have a more sombre, reflective, questioning tone.