George Sutherland Fraser

• Name — George Sutherland Fraser • Born — 8 November 1915 • Birthplace — Glasgow, Scotland • Died — 3 January 1980 • Occupation — Poet, literary critic, academic • Spouse — Eileen Lucy (Paddy) Andrew • Children — 3

Fraser was born in Glasgow, Scotland, later moving with his family to Aberdeen. He attended the University of St. Andrews, where he read History and English. During World War II, he served in the British Army in Cairo and Eritrea. He was published as a poet in Salamander, a Cairo literary magazine. At the same time, he was involved with the New Apocalyptics group, writing an introductory essay for the anthology The White Horseman, and formulating as well as anyone did the idea that they were successors to surrealism.

After the war, he became a prominent figure in London's literary circles, working as a journalist and critic. Together with his wife Paddy, he made friends with a gamut of literary figures, from the intellectual leader William Empson to the eccentric John Gawsworth. He worked with Ian Fletcher to have Gawsworth's Collected Poems (1949) published. Fraser's direction was that of the traditional man of letters (soon to become extinct). In 1948, Fraser contributed an essay entitled "A Language by Itself" to a biblio-symposium honouring the 60th birthday of T. S. Eliot. Drawing comparisons with John Donne, Fraser praised the poet's profound refreshment (particularly in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) of the English poetic tongue, together with his subtle facility for transitional verse and his potent effect on the poetic youth; but, more importantly for present purposes, he also confessed: "I am not a very original writer myself; I am lost, on the whole, without a convention of some sort [...]." In 1949, he accepted the job of replacing Edmund Blunden as Cultural Adviser to the UK Liaison Mission in Tokyo. This ended badly when Fraser suffered a breakdown in 1951 while in Japan. Subsequently, he was much less the poet than the all-purpose writer. In 1959, he became a lecturer at the University of Leicester, remaining there until retirement in 1979.

In 1946, Fraser married Eileen Lucy Andrew (who was known as Paddy from birth). She wrote a brief memoir of her life with Fraser: G. S. Fraser: A Memoir. Together they had two daughters, including Helen Fraser, and a son. Paddy died in 2013.

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