Poetry Recordings: Vernon Scannell
Poetry Recordings: Vernon Scannell
Grade Levels
10th Grade, 11th Grade, 12th Grade, 7th Grade, 8th Grade, 9th Grade
Course, Subject
English Language Arts
Related Academic Standards
Poetry Recordings
Click here to access the historic recordings of Vernon Scannell as well as a brief biography of this author.
Description
Vernon Scannell (b. 1922) has been publishing his poetry since the 1950s, but seems to be less well-known than he deserves, despite being the recipient of the Heinemann Award for Literature and the Cholmondely Award. In addition to his poetry, he has written poems for younger readers, novels, autobiography and criticism, and reviewed poetry for Ambit magazine and The Sunday Telegraph regularly, until ill-health recently prevented this. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded a Civil List Pension for Services to Literature.
His background is fascinating, including serving with the Army in the Middle East and the Normandy Landings. He is a Second World War war poet, the experience of which is clear in 'Walking Wounded' in its ability to look closely, without false pity or false glory, at victims of "last night's lead', and which lends credence to his poems of the Great War, in which his father fought. More uncommon for a poet is his career as a boxer, winning championship titles at both school and university, and working in a fairground boxing-booth.
Herbert Lomas describes Scannell's method as "life's little and big ironies in polished stanzas and complicated verse-forms", which is true of many of the poems in this recording. But Scannell also uses fine blank verse and invented forms, and, in his introduction to a villanelle, talks helpfully about the form in use. Other introductions discuss the inspirations, obscurities or insights to the poems.
His recording was made for The Poetry Archive on 21 May 2001 at his home in Yorkshire and was produced by Richard Carrington. From this page, you can hear the voice of Vernon Scannell reading three of his poems: "Walking Wounded," "The Loving Game," and "The Searchers."
His background is fascinating, including serving with the Army in the Middle East and the Normandy Landings. He is a Second World War war poet, the experience of which is clear in 'Walking Wounded' in its ability to look closely, without false pity or false glory, at victims of "last night's lead', and which lends credence to his poems of the Great War, in which his father fought. More uncommon for a poet is his career as a boxer, winning championship titles at both school and university, and working in a fairground boxing-booth.
Herbert Lomas describes Scannell's method as "life's little and big ironies in polished stanzas and complicated verse-forms", which is true of many of the poems in this recording. But Scannell also uses fine blank verse and invented forms, and, in his introduction to a villanelle, talks helpfully about the form in use. Other introductions discuss the inspirations, obscurities or insights to the poems.
His recording was made for The Poetry Archive on 21 May 2001 at his home in Yorkshire and was produced by Richard Carrington. From this page, you can hear the voice of Vernon Scannell reading three of his poems: "Walking Wounded," "The Loving Game," and "The Searchers."
Content Provider
Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.
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