Robert Wells Biography

British poet and translator, born in Oxford, educated at King's College, Cambridge. Wells has worked as a forester on Exmoor, and much of his best writing is characterized by its depth and immediacy of response to the natural world. With work by Dick Davis and Clive Wilmer, his poetry was featured in Shade Mariners (1970), which demonstrated the survival of traditional verse forms. His collections of poems include The Winter's Task (1977) and Selected Poems (1986), which incorporated new work and extracts from his highly regarded translations of Virgil's Georgics (1982) and Theocritus's Idylls (1988). The sensory vividness with which he writes of landscapes and other natural phenomena in conventional forms gives his poetry a rare freshness and originality. He has written numerous lyrics of considerable poise and clarity in freer styles of verse.