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David (Kenneth) Holbrook |
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David Kenneth Holbrook, fellow of Downing College, Cambridge and director of English studies, is an important literary and cultural critic as well as an important, contemporary poet. For such a prolific author, his work as a poet began late. Although he was in his late thirties before his first volume of verse appeared, his poetry is a crucial part of a creative and critical enterprise, reasserting goodness and truth, celebrating life and reality, in what he views as a technologically dominated society devoted to dehumanization, hate, and false solutions. The back cover of his recent Chance of a Lifetime (1978) describes well the relationship between his criticism and poetry: "His critical work is integral with his central creative preoccupation as exemplified in these poems, in which he finds ways of establishing a sense of meaning in daily existence. The warmth and humanity of his writing, especially about family life, is apparent."
Holbrook maintains that, in contemporary society, "The problems are certainly so deep that they cannot be cured simply by writing more poetry." Indeed, his own poetry presents critical problems of the kind most pertinently raised by Duke Maskell when he calls some of Holbrook's poems too personal.
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