Derek Stanford (writer)

Derek Stanford FRSL (11 October 1918 – 19 December 2008) was a British writer, known as a biographer, essayist and poet.

He was educated at Upper Latymer School, Hammersmith, London.

As a conscientious objector during World War II he served in the Non-Combatant Corps.[1] He edited Resistance, a poetry magazine of just one issue, with David West in 1946.

For a period in the early 1950s he worked with Muriel Spark on several books, and was a supporter of hers (together with the poetic eccentric Hugo Manning, a long-term friend), in the Poetry Society.[2] Stanford described Spark's ousting in Inside the Forties. Spark convinced him of the talent of Dylan Thomas,[3] and Stanford wrote an early book on Thomas shortly after his death.

He died in 2008 in Brighton. His widow is the poet Julie Whitby.

Works
  • A Romantic Miscellany (1946) editor with John Bayliss
  • The Freedom of Poetry: Studies in Contemporary Verse (1947)
  • Music for Statues (1948)
  • Tribute to Wordsworth: A Miscellany of Opinion for the Centenary of the Poet's Death (1950) editor with Muriel Spark
  • Christopher Fry: An Appreciation (1951)
  • Christopher Fry Album (1952
  • Emily Brontë: her life and work (1953) with Muriel Spark
  • My Best Mary (letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) (1953) editor with Muriel Spark
  • Dylan Thomas: a literary study (1954)
  • Letters of John Henry Newman (1957) editor with Muriel Spark
  • Fenelon's Letters to Men and Women (1957) editor
  • Anne Brontë: Her Life And Work (1959) with Ada Harrison
  • John Betjeman - A Study (1961)
  • Muriel Spark: a Biographical and Critical Study (1963)
  • Concealment and Revelation in T. S. Eliot (1965)
  • Poets of the 'Nineties. A Biographical Anthology (1965)
  • Prose of the Century (1966)
  • The Body Of Love: An Anthology of Erotic Verse from Chaucer to Lawrence (1966) editor
  • Aubrey Beardsley's Erotic Universe (1967)
  • Short Stories of the 'Nineties: A Biographical Anthology (1968) editor
  • Movements in English poetry, 1900-1958 (1969)
  • Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis: a critical essay (1969)
  • Critics of the 'Nineties (1970)
  • Writing of the 'Nineties: From Wilde to Beerbohm (1971)
  • Pre-Raphaelite Writing (1973) editor
  • Three Poets of the Rhymers Club: Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson (1974)
  • Inside the Forties: literary memoirs, 1937-1957 (1977)
  • The Memorare Sequence (1997)
  • The Weather Within (1978)
  • The Traveller Hears the Strange Machine: Selected Poems 1946-1979 (1980)
  • The Vision and Death of Aubrey Beardsley (1985)

Notes
  1. Poetry & WW2 : lives of the poets Archived 2008-05-13 at the Wayback Machine
  2. Ivan Savidge, Hugo Manning: Poet and Humanist (1997), pp.51-3.
  3. Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (2003), p. 303.
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