Мартин Сеймур Смит: Поэт, критик и биограф

British poet and literary critic

Martin Roger Seymour Smith (24 April 1928 – 1 July 1998) was a British poet, literary critic, and biographer.

Seymour Smith was born in London and educated at Highgate School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was editor of Isis and Oxford Poetry. His father Frank was a chief librarian who supplied books to Robert Graves, and who published the survey An English Library, an Annotated List of 1300 Classics in 1943, followed by What Shall I Read Next: a Personal Selection of Twentieth Century English Books in 1953. His mother Marjorie wrote poetry and published under the name of Elena Fearn. He began as one of the most promising of Anglophone post war poets, but became better known as a critic, writing biographies of Robert Graves (whom he met first at age 14 and maintained close ties with), Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy, and producing numerous critical studies. The poet and critic Robert Nye stated that Seymour Smith was "one of the finest British poets after 1945." and Tom Stoppard, whom he thought over rated. In 1981, The New Astrologer was published, Seymour Smith's only book on this subject. Anthony Burgess likened Seymour Smith to Samuel Johnson due to his many literary surveys from The Guide to Modern World Literature in 1975 onwards. When the 2013 new edition of the Oxford Companion of Modern Poetry was published, he was notably not included.

He married Janet de Glanville who was a translator and his and Robert Graves' collaborator. When he was asked how he managed to read so much he admitted that he hadn't. Janet had. They were rarely apart and she died two months after he did.