- Title
- Guy Butler: 21 January 1918 - 26 April 2001
- Creator
- Wright, Laurence
- Date
- 2001
- Type
- Article
- Identifier
- vital:7053
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007413
- Description
- [From Introduction]: For much of the last twenty-five years of his life, Butler’s thought and work were not perceived to be ‘current’ at all. His poetry was hardly read (what’s new there? – neither is anyone else’s); some of it lay in manuscript or obscure little publications until the Collected Poems appeared in 1999. The autobiographies attracted a loyal following amongst a small, educated reading public. His early dramas, though they met with initial success, were stifled by the poetic idiom to which they aspired, and by the racial claustrophobia against which they fought. (Demea, Butler’s South African reworking of the Medea, made it to the boards only in 1990 – the multi-racial cast, let alone the themes, kept it in hibernation until then.) The deluge of journalism and polemic suffered the usual fate of ephemera. Until resurrected by Stephen Watson in 1990, the essays and lectures remained buried in periodicals where they could not be assessed as a totality. His inspiring teaching was a gift to his students, hardly accessible to the wider society; and above all, much of his time was spent as homo commiticus, serving on the boards and sub-committees of numerous university institutions and other organizations, some of which he founded. In his autobiography, he observed wryly of his changed status following accession to the Chair of English at Rhodes in 1951: ‘Professors are not entirely themselves. Their interest as persons decreases because they are now public personages. Much of their time is spent on committees whose function is to pick the brains of individuals without giving them credit.’ Guy Butler gave generously of his brains in such circumstances.
- Format
- 5 pages, pdf
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Wright, L.S. (2001) Guy Butler: 21 January 1918 - 26 April 2001. Current Writing, 13 (1). pp. 1-6.
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Collections
Wright, Laurence (Prof)
RU Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA)
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