Why Is Barker Important To America

George Granville Barker was born in 1913 and he came from lower class in the period when class distinction and status were important for people. Barker was mostly self-educated , he left school in early age and worked in diverse types of jobs before finding literature, writing and job as a poet along with literary patronage. He was born to an English father and Irish mother. Devotion to his mother and Irish roots was also expressed in his poems. At the age of twenty-two he was considered a literary phenomenon. He soon commissioned his first volume and got a support fund. (SHEPHERD,2007,n.p).
"His first “official” volume, Poems, was published in 1935 by Faber and Faber under the aegis of T.S. Eliot, who became Barker’s patron, literary and

Today, hardly anyone reads him, most of his work is out of print, and he is barely mentioned in literary histories." ( WILBY,2008,n.p) The fact that he was not much read in America is also surprising because as already mentioned , he reminds the style of his contemporary, Dylan Thomas who is very famous but he was considered more controversial and criticized for extravagant speech and irony used in his poems. In the United Kingdom, he was greatly overshadowed by other poets from his era. This information is more obvious, because of the Auden´s circle poets and Dylan Thomas, writing poetry along with Barker. All those poets wrote romantic poetry or in Thomas‘ case, something close to romantic, to which Barker´s work was something like antithesis but still he worked with the same themes and symbols. But he was concerned more with the reality than dreams and idealism. He differed from others by his style and even Yeats in his Oxford Anthology of Modern Verse 1892-1935, called him a forerunner of a future literary revolution. (WILBY,2008,n.p) "Barker was no minor poet. His work was passionate, intellectually challenging and highly original, his language incantatory and often hypnotic. There are echoes of Blake, Housman, Verlaine and Barker 's contemporary, Dylan Thomas." (WILBY,2008,n.p) "Barker’s poetry, like that of Dylan Thomas and the somewhat younger W.S. Graham, is dense, musical, highly lyrical, visionary, and frequently mingles mysticism and sexuality." (SHEPHERD,2007,n.p). George Barker was very productive and passionate about his work. He seemed to be restless and exploratory. His poetry is written in traditional forms, composition of stanzas, forms such as sonnet or ballad, but there is still singularity and idiosyncrasy typical for his poems . He is extravagant and almost reckless with his poetry but that is what makes his work unique.