Christopher Middleton: Journeys Broken at the Threshold

Abstract

Although he is English by birth and upbringing — born in Truro in 1926, educated at Felsted School in Essex, and at Oxford — Christopher Middleton has always been an outsider in contemporary British poetry. The fact that he has been, since 1966, a professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Texas is a symptom of this status rather than a cause — though it has also, of course, contributed to the effect by introducing Texan landscape and American idioms into his poetry. Even before this move his view of poetry was at odds with the English mainstream — in an interview in The London Magazine in 1964 he complained that “the experiences which most English poets seem to be writing about don’t seem to be experiences which matter very much, even to them.”¹