Associated initially with The Movement, Holloway's work is now thought, in its fresh openness, to reach beyond the violence and pessimism of his more highly regarded contemporaries Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill.
Born in London to George and Evelyn Astbury Holloway, he was educated at the County School in Beckenham, Kent, and went from there to New College, Oxford, where as an Open History Scholar (1938-1941), he received a first-class degree in "Modern Greats" (philosophy, politics, and economics). He served in the war from 1941 to 1945, first in the Royal Artillery and later in intelligence. Returning to Oxford in 1945 as a temporary lecturer in philosophy, he married Audrey Goodings in 1946 (a daughter was born to them in 1961, a son in 1965), completed his D. Phil. in 1947, and became a fellow of All Souls College. His revised doctoral thesis became his first book, Language and Intelligence, which appeared in 1951. Holloway's interest, however, turned from philosophy to literature, and he accepted a lectureship in English at the University of Aberdeen, where he remained from 1949 to 1954, producing his well-known critical book The Victorian Sage (1953).
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