Philip Hobsbaum

Philip Dennis Hobsbaum (29 June 1932 – 28 June 2005)^[1] was a British teacher, poet and critic.^[2]

Life

Hobsbaum was born into a Polish

On arriving in Sheffield (c.1959–1962), he immediately organized the "Writers' Group" for the university's undergraduates and started Poetry from Sheffield, a magazine for their poetry but which also had poems by George MacBeth, Peter Redgrove and Francis Berry. He wrote about the group in The Times Literary Supplement, published on 14 April 1961. Barry Fox took over the chair when Hobsbaum left to concentrate on his thesis.

In Belfast (1962–1966), Hobsbaum organised a new weekly discussion group, which became known as

Though he was a poet as well, it was as a critic that Hobsbaum was best known. Although as one of his obituarists noted, "[h]e was famously not a man who felt a pressing need to endear himself to students", he was a charismatic teacher, and fiercely committed to those with a commitment to literature. The dedication of Alasdair Gray's The Book of Prefaces is "to Philip Hobsbaum poet, critic and servant of servants of art". Seamus Heaney also dedicated the poem "Blackberry-Picking" (from Death of a Naturalist, 1966) to Philip Hobsbaum.

Poetry

• A Group Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1963), edited with Edward Lucie-Smith
• The Place's Fault, and other poems (Macmillan, 1964)
• Snapshots (Belfast: Festival Publications, 1967)
• In Retreat and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1966)
• Coming Out Fighting (Macmillan, 1969)
• Women and Animals (Macmillan, 1972)
• The Pattern of Poetry (1962)

Criticism and other academic writing

• Ten Elizabethan Poets (Longmans, 1969), editor
• A Theory of Communication (Macmillan, 1970), in US as Theory of Criticism (Indiana University Press, 1970)
• A Reader's Guide To Charles Dickens (Thames and Hudson, 1972)
• Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry (Macmillan, 1979)
• A Reader's Guide to D H Lawrence (Thames and Hudson, 1981)
• Essentials Of Literary Criticism (Thames and Hudson, 1983)
• A Reader's Guide to Robert Lowell (Thames and Hudson, 1988)
• William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry and Prose (Routledge, 1989), editor
• Channels of Communication: Papers from the Conference of Higher Education Teachers of English (Dept Eng Lit, University of Glasgow, 1992), edited by Hobsbaum, Paddy Lyons, and Jim McGhee
• Metre, Rhythm And Verse Form (Routledge, 1996)
• Entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for Peter Alexander, William Burnaby, Richard Thomas Church, Everard Guilpin, Alfred Noyes, (James) Stewart Parker, and William Stewart Rose (2004).

References

Further reading

• In 2002, the Scottish-American poetry magazine The Dark Horse printed an interview with him, in which he discussed his biography and work.
• Hobsbaum/Group correspondence archive at University of Texas at Austin
• Belfast Creative Writing Group files at Queen's University Belfast^{[permanent dead link]}

Obituaries

• Obituaries appeared in a number of publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including: Saxon, Wolfgang (2 July 2005), "Philip Hobsbaum, 72, British Poet and Critic, Dies", The New York Times.
• Other obituaries (not online) appeared in the Herald, Scotsman, Jewish Chronicle and The Independent.

External links

• Philip Hobsbaum fonds at University of Victoria, Special Collections
• Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University: Philip Hobsbaum collection, 1962-1971