THE COLLECTED POEMS OF MONTAGU SLATER

Montagu Slater (1902-1956) is remembered, if at all, as the librettist for Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (1945). A journalist by training, and a committed communist from the late 1920s, he was a leading figure in the cultural world of the mid-century left, and co-founded and edited the key journal of the 1930s, Left Review. A pioneer in documentary film, he worked with Britten, John Grierson, W.H. Auden and Alberto Cavalcanti at the General Post Office Film Unit, where he scripted the influential Coal Face (1935). Prolific and erudite with a popular touch, he wrote novels including Once a Jolly Swagman (1944), about the world of speedway (later a film starring Dirk Bogarde), and Englishmen with Swords (1949), which recovered the radical currents of the Civil War. His abiding anti-imperialism found expression in the documentary play, Easter: 1916 (1936), and in his last book, The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (1955), a forensic scrutiny of British colonial justice. A lifelong theatre man, Slater wrote drama criticism for Reynold’s News in the 1930s and was theatre editor at Our Time in the 1940s. Across three decades he wrote theatrical works ranging from pageants, sketches and puppet plays to full-length dramas.
Poetry was equally important to Slater, although this side of his work has been less visible until now. This book re-prints Slater’s only published collection, Peter Grimes and other Poems (1946), alongside poems originally published in periodicals and newspapers. It also brings into print previously unpublished poems selected from Slater’s Literary Papers at the University of Nottingham. With its detailed Introduction, Montagu Slater: The Poems restores to view the life and work of a significant twentieth-century writer.