Things Common, Properly

Selected Poems 1942-1982

Whigham Peter

"Things Common", Properly is a major retrospective collection of Peter Whigham's poems and verse translations. The selection contains all the poems which he wishes to keep in print, and includes the whole of "The Blue Winged Bee", which was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1969. It also contains much previously uncollected and unpublished material, such as his poems about childhood ("The Feast & The Gypsies"), his exquisite renderings of some Sappho fragments, and his adaptation of "The Genealogy of Women" from Semonides.

William Carlos Williams described Peter Whigham as "the most delightful translator of Catullus", and Hugh Kenner wrote of The "Poems of Catullus" that it is "not only a reclamation of the past, but a book for young poets to study". This collection shows some of his other translations in the context of his original poetry, to which they form a natural extension. Like others who learned their craft from Ezra Pound, Peter Whigham has found his inspiration both at home and abroad, in times past and present, and his strong sense of tradition brings seemingly distant times and places together in a compelling imaginative framework of his own.

About the Author

Peter Whigham was born in Oxford, England in 1925 and was largely self-educated. He worked as a gardener, a school teacher, an actor, a newspaper reporter, and a script writer before moving to live for some years in Italy. He moved again to the United States in 1966, the year in which his Penguin "The Poems of Catullus" appeared, first as a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and later in the comparative literature department at UC Berkeley. He was a well known Ezra Pound scholar. He died in a car accident in 1987.

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