Robin Flower - Life

Life

He was born at Meanwood in Yorkshire, and educated at Leeds Grammar School and Pembroke College, Oxford. He worked from 1929 as Deputy Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum and, completing the work of Standish Hayes O'Grady, compiled a catalogue of the Irish manuscripts there.

He wrote several collections of poetry, translations of the Irish poets for the Cuala Press, and verses on Blasket Island. He first visited Blasket in 1910, at the recommendation of Carl Marstrander, his teacher at the School of Irish Learning in Dublin; he acquired there the Irish nickname Bláithín. He suggested a Norse origin for the name "Blasket". Under Flower's influence, George Derwent Thomson and Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson made scholarly visits to Blasket.

After his death his ashes were scattered on the Blasket Islands.

Read more about this topic:  Robin Flower

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    “In this lucid and flexible pattern only one thing remained always stationary, but this fallacy went unnoticed by Martha. The blind spot was the victim. The victim showed no signs of life before being deprived of it. If anything, the corpse which had to be moved and handled before burial seemed more active than its biological predecessor.”
    —Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    “I sometimes have the sense that I live my life as a writer with my nose pressed against the wide, shiny plate glass window of the “mainstream” culture. The world seems full of straight, large-circulation, slick periodicals which wouldn’t think of reviewing my book and bookstores which will never order it.”
    —Jan Clausen (b. 1943)

    “He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)