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==External links==
==External links==
* {{Find a Grave|31844067}}
* {{Find a Grave|31844067}}
* [http://byron.nottingham.ac.uk/resources/digital/foundation%20lectures/bowra.html C. M. Bowra, ''The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy''] – 1946 Byron Foundation Lecture
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110813000609/http://byron.nottingham.ac.uk/resources/digital/foundation%20lectures/bowra.html C. M. Bowra, ''The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy''] – 1946 Byron Foundation Lecture
* [http://www.aristarchus.unige.net/CPhCl/en/Database Catalogus Philologorum Classicorum]
* [http://www.aristarchus.unige.net/CPhCl/en/Database Catalogus Philologorum Classicorum]
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Revision as of 11:52, 22 January 2018

Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra
The Very Reverend John Lowe
Succeeded byAlic Halford Smith
Personal details
Born(1898-04-08)8 April 1898
Jiujiang, China
Died4 July 1971(1971-07-04) (aged 73)
Oxford, England
Alma materNew College, Oxford
Military career
Allegiance United Kingdom
Service/branch British Army
Years of service1917–1918
UnitRoyal Artillery
Battles/warsWorld War I

Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra

Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford
from 1951 to 1954.

Early life and education

Birth and boyhood

Bowra was born in

Newchwang, and the family lived there for the first five years of Bowra's life,[6] except during the Boxer Rebellion, in the summer of 1900, when Bowra was evacuated to Japan along with his mother, his elder brother, Edward, and other women and children of the European community.[7]

The family returned to England in 1903, travelling via Japan and the United States, and settled in the

St Paul's School[13] and father of the writer Antonia White.[14]

In 1909 the Bowra brothers journeyed across Europe and Russia by train to visit their parents in

Lord Kitchener.[15] Their return journey, which they made in the company of their father, took them through Hong Kong, Colombo, Suez, Naples and Algiers.[16]

Cheltenham College

Bowra boarded at

Divina Commedia, and began to learn German.[13] Bowra maintained a connection with the school in later life, being instrumental in the appointment of Cecil Day-Lewis as a master there and serving on its governing body from 1943 to 1965.[19]

World War I

By 1916 Bowra's father was Chief Secretary of the Chinese Customs and resided in Beijing in a household with thirty servants.

Ming Tombs, and witnessed the funeral of Yuan Shikai.[21]

Bowra departed from Beijing in September and on his way home spent three weeks in

St Petersburg (then called Petrograd) as a guest of Robert Wilton.[21] During this time he attained a working knowledge of Russian[13] and attended operas in which Feodor Chaliapin performed.[22]

After his return to England he began training with the OTC in Oxford

Ludendorff Offensive and the Allied counter-offensive.[26] During this time he continued to read widely, including both contemporary poets and Greek and Latin authors.[26]

Bowra was left with a lifelong hatred of war and military strategists, and seldom mentioned the war afterwards.[27] He later told Cyril Connolly, "Whatever you hear about the war, remember it was far worse: inconceivably bloody – nobody who wasn't there can imagine what it was like."[28] Anthony Powell wrote that Bowra's wartime experiences "played a profound part in his thoughts and inner life,"[29] and records that when a cruise ship they were travelling on held a ceremony to place a wreath in the sea as it passed the Dardanelles Bowra was so affected that he retired to his cabin.[30] Following the Second World War he was accommodating to returning servicemen who wished to study at Oxford, telling one applicant who was worried about his deficiency in Latin, "No matter, war service counts as Latin."[31]

Undergraduate years

In 1919 Bowra took up a scholarship he had won to

Robert Boothby,[26] L. P. Hartley,[26] Lord David Cecil,[26] J. B. S. Haldane[26] and Christopher Hollis.[32] He also became a friend of Dadie Rylands.[26] The teachers who influenced him included Gilbert Murray and Alic Smith.[33] The treatment he received from one of his tutors in philosophy, H. W. B. Joseph, was said by Isaiah Berlin to have "undermined his faith in his own intellectual capacity".[34]

Academic career

In 1922 Bowra was elected a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford,[3] with the support of the Regius Professor of Greek, Gilbert Murray,[35] and appointed Dean of Wadham shortly afterwards.[36] When Murray vacated his chair in 1936 Bowra and others believed that Bowra himself was most likely to succeed him,[35] but Murray recommended E. R. Dodds as his successor, rejecting Bowra because of "a certain lack of quality, precision and reality in his scholarship as a whole".[37] Some believed that the real reason was a whispering campaign over Bowra's "real or imagined homosexuality".[38]

Bowra became a

Sandy Lindsay.[43]

During the

Second World War Bowra served in the Oxford Home Guard[44] and was not offered any war work. When Berlin canvassed to find Bowra a position the file was sent back to him stamped "unreliable".[44]

Bowra was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1946 to 1951.[33] He wrote of the election for the post that "The campaign was very enjoyable and C. S. Lewis was outmanoeuvred so completely that he even failed in the end to be nominated, and I walked over without opposition. Very gratifying to a vain man like myself."[45]

Bowra spent the academic year 1948–49 at

Andrew Lang lecture. He delivered the 1957 Earl Grey Lecture in Newcastle on "The Meaning of a Heroic Age" and the 1963 Taylorian Lecture on "Poetry and the First World War".[33] In 1966 he gave the Romanes Lecture.[46]

Bowra was at Harvard when the post of

Dean Lowe filled the post until 1951, when Bowra served his three-year term.[47] As chair of the Hebdomadal Council he dealt with the business of meetings that customarily occupied a whole afternoon in as little as fifteen minutes.[48] When T. S. R. Boase was indisposed by an eye problem in 1959 Bowra returned to chair the committee[49] and privately remarked that "jokes about his beaux yeux are not thought funny".[50]

Bowra was President of the British Academy from 1958 to 1962.[3] His tenure was marked by two achievements:[51] he chaired the committee that produced the Report on Research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which resulted in a grant for those purposes from HM Treasury;[51] and he helped to establish the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran.[52]

In his long career as an Oxford don Bowra had contact with a considerable portion of the English literary world, either as students or as colleagues. The character of Mr Samgrass in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is said to have been modelled on Bowra.[53] Cyril Connolly, Henry Green, Anthony Powell and Kenneth Clark knew Bowra quite well when they were undergraduates. Clark called Bowra "the strongest influence in my life".[54][55] Waugh marked his friend's election as Warden of Wadham by presenting him with a monkey-puzzle tree for his garden.[56]

Bowra and George Alfred Kolkhorst were avowed arch-enemies,[citation needed] though both were friends of John Betjeman. Betjeman records his appreciation of Bowra in his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, in which he evokes an evening spent dining with Bowra in a passage that concludes: "I wandered back to Magdalen, certain then,/ As now, that Maurice Bowra’s company / Taught me far more than all my tutors did."

Though he was not in any sense religious, Bowra signed the petition (in favour of the

Catholic Mass) that became informally known as the Agatha Christie indult and regularly attended the Church of England services in his college's chapel.[57]

Verse

Bowra had learned the value of verse during the First World War.[56] Cyril Connolly wrote that Bowra "saw human life as a tragedy in which great poets were the heroes who fought back and tried to give life a meaning".[58] Bowra was an important champion of Boris Pasternak, lecturing on his work and nominating him repeatedly for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[59]

However, Bowra was never able to fulfil his wish to be accepted as a serious poet himself.

Princess Margaret with the Duff Cooper Prize on 18 December 1958. The judges on that occasion were Lord David Cecil, Harold Nicolson and Bowra himself as chairman. Duff Cooper's widow Lady Diana Cooper observed that "Poor Betch was crying and too moved to find an apology for words." (Philip Ziegler
, Diana Cooper: The Biography of Lady Diana Cooper, Hamish Hamilton 1981, p. 310.)

Green with lust and sick with shyness,

Let me lick your lacquered toes.
Gosh, oh gosh, your Royal Highness,
Put your finger up my nose,
Pin my teeth upon your dress,
Plant my head with watercress.
Only you can make me happy.
Tuck me tight beneath your arm.
Wrap me in a woollen nappy;
Let me wet it till it's warm.
In a plush and plated pram
Wheel me round St James's, Ma'am.
Let your sleek and soft galoshes
Slide and slither on my skin.
Swaddle me in mackintoshes
Till I lose my sense of sin.
Lightly plant your plimsolled heel

Where my privy parts congeal.

The

Telegraph, echoing Cecil Day-Lewis on the man himself, warned that the book, like strychnine, was best taken in small doses.[61]

Two poems on Patrick Leigh Fermor were omitted from the book, in deference to their subject's wishes, but were published after his death in 2011. (They are available at http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/dugdale/bowra/websiteplf.pdf.)

Sexuality

Bowra was

Homintern"[62] and privately referred to his leading position in it, also calling it "the Immoral Front" or "the 69th International".[63]

Retirement and death

Bowra retired in 1970, but continued to live in rooms in the college that had been granted to him in exchange for a house he owned.[39] He became an honorary fellow of Wadham and was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law.[33] He died of a sudden heart attack in 1971[64] and was buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.[65]

Honours

In addition to his

Aix.[33]

Bowra was knighted in 1951 and was appointed a

Légion d'honneur in France, a Knight Commander of the Royal Order of the Phoenix in Greece and a recipient of the order "Pour le Mérite" in West Germany.[33]

In 1992

Bowra Building
in his honour.

Quotations

Bibliography

  • Pindar's Pythian Odes (1928), co-translator with
    H. T. Wade-Gery
  • The Oxford Book of Greek Verse (1930), co-editor with Gilbert Murray, Cyril Bailey, E. A. Barber and T. F. Higham
  • Tradition and Design in the Iliad (1930)
  • Ancient Greek Literature (1933)
  • Pindari Carmina (1935; 2nd edition 1947)
  • Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides (Oxford 1936, 2nd revision 2001)
  • The Oxford Book of Greek Poetry in Translation (1937), co-editor with T. F. Higham
  • Early Greek Elegists (1938), the Martin Lectures at Oberlin College
  • The Heritage of Symbolism (1943)
  • A Book of Russian Verse (1943), editor (a collection of translations, none by Bowra)
  • Sophoclean Tragedy (1944)
  • From Virgil to Milton (1945)
  • A Second Book of Russian Verse (1948) editor (a collection of translations, none by Bowra)
  • The Creative Experiment (1949)
  • The Romantic Imagination (1950)
  • Heroic Poetry (1952)
  • Problems in Greek Poetry (1953)
  • Inspiration and Poetry (1955)
  • Homer and His Forerunners (Thomas Nelson, 1955)
  • The Greek Experience (1957)
  • Primitive Song (1962)
  • In General and Particular (1964)
  • Pindar (1964)
  • Landmarks in Greek Literature (1966)
  • Poetry and Politics, 1900–1960 (1966), the Wiles Lectures at the
    Queen's University, Belfast
  • Memories 1898–1939 (1966)
  • The Odes of Pindar (1969, reissued 1982), translator
  • On Greek Margins (1970)
  • Periclean Athens (1971)
  • Homer (1972)
  • New Bats in Old Belfries, or Some Loose Tiles (2005), ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes, with an introduction by Julian Mitchell

Bowra also wrote a foreword to Voices From the Past: A Classical Anthology for the Modern Reader, ed. James and Janet Maclean Todd (1955), as well as forewords to other works.

Notes

  1. ISBN 978-0-19-956840-6
    .
  2. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 3
  3. ^ a b c d e f Mitchell (2004)
  4. ^ Mitchell (2009) p. 5
  5. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 4
  6. ^ Mitchell (2009), pp. 3, 9
  7. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 10
  8. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 12
  9. ^ Mitchell (2009), p 11
  10. ^ Lloyd Jones, p. 22
  11. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 13; Lloyd-Jones, p. 22
  12. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 15
  13. ^ a b c d e Lloyd-Jones, p. 23
  14. ^ Nelson, p. 76
  15. ^ Mitchell (2009), pp. 15–16
  16. ^ a b Mitchell (2009), p. 16
  17. ^ Mitchell (2009), pp. 16–17
  18. ^ a b Mitchell (2009), p. 18
  19. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 21
  20. ^ Mitchell (2009) p. 27
  21. ^ a b c Mitchell (2009), p. 28
  22. ^ Mitchell (2009) p. 29
  23. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 32
  24. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 35
  25. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 36
  26. ^ a b c d e f g Lloyd-Jones, p. 24
  27. ^ Hollis p.18
  28. ^ Cyril Connolly in Lloyd-Jones, p. 44
  29. ^ In Lloyd-Jones, p. 95
  30. ^ In Lloyd-Jones, p. 103
  31. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 45
  32. ^ a b c Hollis, p. 20
  33. ^ a b c d e f g h Times obituary, 3 July 1971, reprinted as Chapter 1 in Lloyd-Jones.
  34. ^ Memorial Address, in Lloyd-Jones, p. 17
  35. ^ a b Mitchell (2009), p. 83
  36. ^ Lewis, Jeremy. Cyril Connolly: A Life.
  37. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 84
  38. T. W. Adorno
    .
  39. ^ a b Mitchell (2009), p. 305
  40. ^ a b Annan (1999), p. 143
  41. ^ a b Hollis, p. 34
  42. ^ Mitchell (2009) p. 236.
  43. ^ Hollis, p. 36.
  44. ^ a b Mitchell (2009), pp. 241-42.
  45. ^ Annan (1999), p. 163
  46. ^ Mitchell (2009), pp. 290–91
  47. ^ a b c Kenneth Wheare, in Lloyd-Jones, p. 123
  48. ^ Kenneth Wheare, in Lloyd-Jones, ppp. 123-24
  49. ^ Kenneth Wheare, in Lloyd-Jones, p. 127
  50. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 261
  51. ^ a b Mortimer Wheeler, in Lloyd-Jones, p. 130
  52. ^ Mortimer Wheeler, in Lloyd-Jones, pp. 131-33
  53. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 190
  54. ^ Jeremy Lewis, Cyril Connolly: A Life, Jonathan Cape 1997
  55. ^ Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood, Harper & Row 1974, p. 99
  56. ^ a b c Mitchell (2009), p. 237
  57. ^ Mitchell (2009), pp. 316–17
  58. ^ Cyril Connolly, in Lloyd-Jones, p. 46.
  59. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 115
  60. ^ Mercurius Oxoniensis (perhaps Hugh Trevor-Roper), in Lloyd-Jones, p. 42.
  61. ^ a b Jones (2005)
  62. ^ a b Annan (1999), p. 165
  63. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 123
  64. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 307
  65. ^ Mitchell 2009, p. 308
  66. ^ Hollis, p. 22. "Allegedly," according to Mitchell (2009), p. 144
  67. ^ Knowles
  68. ^ Cartwright (2008)
  69. ^ Mitchell (2009), p. 147
  70. ^ Wilson
  71. Noel Annan
    quoted in Lloyd-Jones, p. 53.
  72. ^ Doniger (2000) p. 193
  73. ^ G.W. Bowersock, 2009. "Unquiet Flows the Don," The New Republic, [review of Mitchell (2009), October 5.

References

External links

Academic offices
Preceded by
John Frederick Stenning
 Warden of Wadham College, Oxford
1938–1970 		Succeeded by
Preceded by
The Very Reverend John Lowe
Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University

1951–1954 		Succeeded by

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