Francis Scarfe

He also studied at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and at the Sorbonne. While in Paris he wrote surrealist verse, and dabbled in communism, from which he then retreated. He taught at the University of Glasgow briefly before the outbreak of World War II, in which he worked in the British Army's Education Corps. He was posted to Orkney, and the Faroe Islands. While in Orkney he lodged with the family of the young George Mackay Brown, on whom he was a major influence. His book from 1942 was one of the first to engage critically with the Auden Group, if superficially; he returned to Auden in a post-war book of greater depth. After the war he held a number of academic positions, teaching French literature at Glasgow and subsequently at the University of London, where he was professor of French from 1965 to 1978. From 1959 until his retirement he was also director of the British Institute in Paris.

Francis Scarfe studied at University of Paris, Fitzwilliam College and Durham University. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is poetry, literary criticism and translation from French. Places of work recorded in the authority are Paris.

• Inscapes (1940), poems • Forty Poems and Ballads (1941) • Auden & After: The Liberation Of Poetry, 1930-41 (1942), criticism • Promises (?) first novel • W. H. Auden (1948), criticism • Underworlds (1950), poems • Single Blessedness (1951), novel • The Unfinished Woman (1954), novel • The Art of Paul Valéry (1954) • Picasso by Frank Elgar and Robert Maillard (1956), translator • Baudelaire (1961, Penguin Books), editor • Conversations on the Dresden Gallery, by Louis Aragon and Jean Cocteau (1982), translator • Complete Verse of Charles P. Baudelaire (1986 Anvil Press Poetry), translator • Baudelaire: the Poems in Prose (1989, Anvil Press Poetry), translator