Vernon Watkins
Vernon Watkins was a Welsh poet born in 1906 in Maesteg, Wales, later moving to Swansea, where he spent most of his life. He began writing poetry during his school years and attended Magdalene College, Cambridge, but left before completing his degree to pursue his poetic ambitions. After a period working at Lloyd's Bank, he experienced a mental breakdown that transformed his perspective on poetry, leading him to destroy his earlier works and develop a new artistic vision. Watkins published his first collection, *The Ballad of Mari Lwyd, and Other Poems*, in 1941 and served in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He formed significant friendships with notable poets, including William Butler Yeats and Dylan Thomas, which influenced his work. After the war, he returned to Swansea to continue writing and eventually took on teaching roles, including a visiting professorship at the University of Washington in Seattle. Watkins passed away in 1967, and his poetic reputation has grown steadily since his death.
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Vernon Watkins
Poet
- Born: June 27, 1906
- Birthplace: Maesteg, South Wales, Wales
- Died: October 8, 1967
- Place of death: Seattle, Washington
Biography
Vernon Watkins was born in Maesteg, Wales, in 1906, one of the three children of William Watkins, a branch manager at Lloyd’s Bank, and Sarah Watkins. His family moved to Swansea, Wales, in 1913, and that city remained Watkins’s home for the rest of his life. He began writing poetry while attending preparatory schools. At Repton, a public school in Derbyshire, he was confirmed in the Church of England.
Watkins entered Magdalene College, Cambridge University, where he read modern languages, but he left school suddenly without completing his degree, evidently feeling that the critical study of literature endangered his poetic impulses. When he returned home, his father found him a position at Lloyd’s Bank, but the tension between his daytime life as a clerk and his evening vocation of poetry eventually resulted in a dramatic mental breakdown. Watkins was confined to a nursing home for several months, after which his father managed to find him another junior position at Lloyd’s. With a few brief interruptions, Watkins worked for the bank for the rest of his life.
His illness gave him a new poetic vision. After destroying all of his old poems, he settled into a pattern of working, happily this time, as a bank cashier during the day while concentrating on poetry, his true calling, in the evening. His poetry expressed his newly gained insights into the relationship of art and time.
In 1938, Watkins traveled to Ireland to meet the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, whose work he had long revered. During that same period he became friends with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas; the two remained friends throughout Thomas’s life, despite their disparate poetry and lifestyles. Watkins’s first collection of poems, The Ballad of Mari Lwyd, and Other Poems, was published to good reviews in 1941.
From 1941 to 1946, Watkins served in the Royal Air Force and the British intelligence service. While he was stationed near Oxford, he met Gwendolyn Davies, whom he married in 1944; the couple later had five children. After World War II, Watkins returned to Swansea to work at Lloyd’s and to steadily write and publish his poetry.
In 1964, he accepted a yearlong appointment as a visiting professor of poetry at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also taught literature at University College in Swansea, and that school awarded him an honorary doctor of literature degree. Watkins died of a heart attack in 1967 soon after he arrived in Seattle to begin a second appointment at the University of Washington. His poetic reputation, always high, has risen steadily since his death.