FRANCIS SCARFE – a selection of his poems not appearing in Inscapes (The Fortune Press 1940), Forty poems and ballads (The Fortune Press [1941]), Underworlds (William Heinemann 1950), or Grounds for conceit (Outposts Publications 1984). Professor Francis Scarfe (1911-1986), D.Litt., F.R.S.L., C.B.E., Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Critic, novelist, poet, scholar and translator, he was Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, and then for 20 years Director of the British Institute in Paris. He published four collections of poetry and three novels, but was best known for his pioneering critical study Auden and After (1942) reprinted many times, and his scholarly The Art of Paul Valéry (1954) and André Chénier (1965). His translations include work by Aragon, Bazin, Cocteau, La Fontaine, Jean and Simonne Lacouture, Maillard, Seuphor and Valéry, but his translations of Baudelaire brought him most success, with a 1961 Penguin edition (reprinted) and the 1986 & 1989 Anvil Press editions (reprinted, and now in new editions).
