John Holloway (poet)

Born in Croydon, South London (but then part of Surrey) and educated at the County School at Beckenham in Kent and the University of Oxford (New College), he served in the Royal Artillery and Intelligence during the Second World War and then pursued an academic career.

He was married twice, in 1946 to Audrey Gooding with whom he had a son and daughter, and in 1978 to Joan Black. He died in Cambridge.^[1]

He was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, from 1946 to 1960 and of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1955 to 1982, becoming a Life Fellow on his retirement. He held a post as lecturer in English at Aberdeen University (1949–54), and then moved to the University of Cambridge, where he was successively Lecturer in English (1954–66), Reader (1966-72), and Professor of Modern English (1972–82). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1956.^[1] Holloway gave the 1958 Chatterton Lecture on Poetry.^[2][3] From 1961 to 1963 he served as Byron Professor at the University of Athens. As Chairman of the Department of English at Cambridge (1970–71), he initiated an important broadening of the undergraduate literature curriculum, in particular to include American literature.

Holloway was among the contributors to New Lines (1956), a group anthology by Movement poets edited by Robert Conquest.^[4] However, Iain Wright counsels that Holloway "was not … of any movement" and that "his poetic voice, with its odd blend of cerebration and sensuality, the donnish and the Dionysiac, was entirely his own, sui generis."^[5]

James Diggle has called Holloway's long poem Civitatula (1993) "the culmination of his poetic achievement."^[6] Howard Erskine-Hill reports that "Some claim that Civitatula is the best long poem written out of England since Four Quartets."^[1]