David Gascoyne
born October 10, 1916, Harrow, Middlesex,
England
died November 25, 2001, Newport, Isle of
Wight
English poet deeply influenced by the
French Surrealist movement of the 1930s.
Gascoyne’s first book of poems, Roman
Balcony, appeared in 1932 when he was only
16, and his only novel, Opening Day,
appeared the next year. The royalty advance
for Opening Day enabled him to visit Paris,
which encouraged a passionate interest in
Surrealism. His important introductory work,
A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935), and his
verses Man’s Life Is This Meat (1936) were
milestones of the movement in England.
Poems, 1937–42 (1943) marked the beginning
of his religious verse and contains some of
his finest poems, among them his noted
good-bye to the 1930s—“Farewell Chorus.”
Night Thoughts, a long, semidramatic poem,
was broadcast in 1955 and published the next
year.
Gascoyne’s early poetry bears the
Surrealist impress boldly, and, through his
translations of works by Salvador Dalí and
André Breton and his critical writings, he
did much to make the movement known in
Britain. Gascoyne’s Collected Poems 1988
(1988) is a revised and enlarged version,
with autobiographical introduction, of a
volume first published in 1965. His
Collected Verse Translations, chiefly from
the French, was released in 1970. Paris
Journal, 1937–1939 (1978) and Journal
1936–37 (1980), jointly published as
Collected Journals, 1936–42 in 1991, record
the political and artistic movements of the
late 1930s.
