Enid Starkie - Oxford

Oxford

She taught modern languages at Exeter and then in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. Her biography of Baudelaire (1933) was for many English readers their first introduction to the poet. She wrote perceptively on André Gide (1953), securing him an honorary doctorate at Oxford in 1947. She also played a major part in establishing the poetic reputation of Arthur Rimbaud (1938), receiving the first doctorate to be given in the Faculty of Modern Languages for her work Rimbaud in Abyssinia. She published two major volumes on Flaubert (1967, 1971). In 1951 she campaigned successfully to have the quinquennially elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford be a practising poet rather than a critic. She argued that "the Chair ought to go to someone outside the University, to someone who would not otherwise be heard in Oxford. There were enough people already engaged in talking about poetry as critics, indeed too many." C. S. Lewis was defeated by Cecil Day-Lewis in the first subsequent election. She also campaigned successfully for W. H. Auden (1956), Robert Graves (1961), and Edmund Blunden (1966) in subsequent elections for the Chair, leading one critic to complain that, "This was a serious academic affair until Dr. Starkie turned it into something like the Oxford and Cambridge boat race." She also secured an honorary doctorate for Jean Cocteau in 1956.

She was honoured as an officer of the Legion d'honneur in 1958, and as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1967. The academic Walter Starkie was her brother. Many people regarded her as eccentric. An article in Time magazine portrayed her as "a brilliant Rimbaud scholar who pub-crawls about Oxford in bright red slacks and beret while smoking cigars."Francis Steegmuller wrote, "One of the things I most enjoyed about her was her true eccentricity, in a world where false eccentricity has become a kind of conformity. My wife is the novelist, Shirley Hazzard, and I always wonder when Enid will appear in one of her books."