Selected Poems

by Dennis Keene

This book is a collection of selected poems of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who is revealed as subtle and graceful poet and a translator whose vigorous and faithful versions of the Aeneid continue to enrich the literary tradition.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

104 pages, Paperback

First published April 11, 2003

About the author

Dennis Keene was a poet, lecturer and award-winning translator of Japanese poetry and literature.

He was born in 1934, in Richmond, Surrey, and graduated from the Richmond and East Sheen County Grammar School for Boys, and studied at Oxford University

.With Peter Ferguson he became joint editor of Oxford Poetry, the literary journal whose editors have included Robert Graves, Anthony Thwaite and John Fuller. After Oxford, he became a British Council lecturer in Singapore and Malaysia, but a turning point in his life came when he was appointed Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Kyoto University in 1961. He met his future wife Keiko in Kyoto and they were married there in 1962.

Apart from a brief period as a full-time writer and translator in the UK, the last 20 years of Dennis Keene's career were spent in Tokyo as a professor at the prestigious Japan Women's University. He retired in 1993 and died in 2007.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Howard combines a detached outlook and elegant style. He offers: translations; courtly life, loves, and politics; Biblical laments. Top tips: 29, 30, 34.

[Michael Goldsmith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not a poetry critic but I think ocassionally Surrey's verse felt a little thin. I wasn't entirely bothered about some of the translations either. Nevertheless I was fascinated to read poetry by an somewhat forgotten figure in Tudor history.