Skelton, Robin (1925–1997), poet and academic writer and teacher, was born on 12 October 1925 in the schoolhouse of the village of Easington in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the only child of Cyril Frederick William Skelton (1879–1964), a schoolteacher, and his wife, Lili (1888–1982), daughter of William Robins and his wife, Eliza, née Young. He was educated at Easington village school, where his father was headmaster, until the age of almost eleven, when he was sent as a boarding pupil to Pocklington Grammar School. On leaving school in 1943, he was placed on a six months’ course, sponsored by the Royal Air Force for potential officers, at Christ’s College, Cambridge. His war service in the Royal Air Force was spent mainly in India as a codes and cypher clerk with the rank of sergeant. After demobilization, he studied English Literature at Leeds University from 1947 to 1950, and obtained a First Class Honours B.A. degree, which was followed by the degree of M.A. in 1951.
From 1951 to 1963 he was on the staff of the English Department of the University of Manchester, initially as an assistant lecturer but from 1954 as a full lecturer. In 1953 he married his first wife, Margaret Lambert, and after their divorce, his second wife, Sylvia Mary Snow, née Jarrett, in 1957. A son, Nicholas, and two daughters, Alison and Brigid, were born from the second marriage.
During his period in Manchester he became involved in a wide range of literary and artistic activities. As a student he had acquired an interest in a small publishing house, the Lotus Press, and this he continued to manage until 1952. In 1955 he published his first major collection of verse, Patmos and other Poems. This was followed by further collections, including Third Day Lucky (1958), Begging the Dialect (1960), and The Dark Window (1962). To supplement his university salary, Skelton worked part-time for the Manchester Guardian, first as a poetry reviewer and later as a theatre critic. He was also an examiner for the Northern Universities Matriculation Board and subsequently became Chairman of Examiners for its English ‘O’ level examination. Whilst preparing his work on versification, The Poetic Pattern (1956), he made the acquaintance of many of the leading British poets of the time, including William Empson, Louis MacNeice, David Gascoyne, and Kathleen Raine. Always a gregarious man, Skelton had a wide acquaintance among the local artists and writers active in Manchester, and was instrumental in founding the Peterloo Group in conjunction with Michael Seward Snow and Tony Connor. Later he helped to found the Manchester Institute of Contemporary Arts, drafting its constitution and acting as its first secretary. In 1960 he travelled to Dublin to research the papers of the Irish playwright, J. M. Synge. The visit fostered a lifelong affection and empathy in him for Ireland and its writers, and resulted in a number of publications relating to Irish literature including an anthology of modern Irish poets, Six Irish Poets (OUP, 1962) and collected editions of J. M. Synge, Jack B. Yeats, and David Gascoyne.
The turning point in Skelton’s career came in 1963, when he and his young family emigrated to Canada so that he could take up a post of Associate Professor in the newly created University of Victoria, British Columbia. In Canada in the setting of a new and growing university, he had a fruitful environment in which to develop his considerable and many-sided talents whether as poet, writer, anthologist, editor, literary or dramatic critic, collage artist, publisher, administrator or dedicated teacher. With characteristic energy and industry he soon became immersed in all of these activities. After three years as Associate Professor, in 1966 he became a full Professor of English, and was from 1967 to 1973 Director of the newly formed Creative Writing Program which he had inaugurated. This became the Department of Creative Writing in 1973 with Skelton as its Chairman until 1976. From 1967 to 1971 he founded and jointly edited the prestigious Malahat Review and was its sole editor from 1972 to 1983. He received recognition as a Canadian writer, when in 1981 he became Vice-chairman and in 1982–3 Chairman of the Writers’ Union of Canada. Continuing his part-time career as a publisher, Skelton acted as editor-in-chief of two small presses in Victoria, first the Sono Nis Press from 1967 to 1982 and the Pharos Press from 1972. His artistic activities included a number of one-man exhibitions of collages, with shows in Victoria in 1966, 1968, and 1980.
Throughout his years in Canada, Skelton continued to produce scholarly critical and literary works. His output was prodigious with over one hundred separate titles to his credit during his long and fruitful career. Apart from the works on the writers of the Irish Renaissance, he wrote a number of books on versification and the craft of poetry, including The Practice of Poetry (1971), The Poet’s Calling (1975), and the posthumously published The Shapes of our Singing (2002), as well as editing several anthologies including the Penguin editions, Poetry of the Thirties (1964) and Poetry of the Forties (1968). It is however for his own poetry that he is best known and for which he would have liked best to be remembered. Robin Skelton’s belief in the importance of poetry as central to his life was held from a very young age. First published in a student magazine at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he continued to write and publish poems for the rest of his life, producing an astonishing body of work, which continued to change and develop throughout his career. The earlier poetry published in England in the 1950s and early 1960s was in the New Movement style of the time relatively low-key and unemotional, but he went on to develop his own distinctive style with the reflective quasi-autobiographical and longer narrative poems of Timelight (1974) and Callsigns (1976) giving way to the shorter, brighter, almost incantatory poems of Popping Fuchsias (1992) and especially One Leaf Shaking (1996). Many of Skelton’s poems show the strong influence of his boyhood experiences in his natal village located between the North Sea and the wide Humber estuary, and use the imagery of the sea, its tides and pebbled beaches, and the distant horizons across the estuary mudflats. Throughout his life, Skelton was fascinated by the varieties of poetic form and his later poems in particular demonstrate an impressive range of forms taken from cultures as diverse as those of Wales and Japan, as well as forms invented by himself.
Robin Skelton, was an impressive even eccentric figure whom many of his students found at first daunting until they discovered the essential kindness and humility of the man himself. He has been described as looking like an ancient druid with, in later life, his flowing beard, long white hair, talismanic pentagram, tattooed wrist and chunky rings on his fingers. Skelton was scornful of convention and social conformism. He became interested in the occult and whilst in Canada was initiated as a practising witch in the Wiccan tradition and wrote several works on witchcraft including Spellcraft (1978), Talismanic Magic (1985), and The Practice of Witchcraft Today (1988).
Whilst Skelton is well known and honoured in Canada, it is a sad fact that at the beginning of the 21st Century, he is relatively little known and rarely anthologized in Britain, as he himself complained in his autobiography, The Memoirs of a Literary Blockhead (1988). It is perhaps ironic that his decision to move to Canada which so stimulated his development as a poet should have also served to isolate him from the literary attention of his native country. This is much to be regretted as his poetry is powerful, haunting, and insightful, and he deserves to be more widely known and read.
Robin Skelton died after a short illness, brought on by complications resulting from diabetes and congestive heart failure, at his home in Victoria, B.C., on 27 August 1997 aged 71.
Peter A. Crowther 30/7/02