Beer, John, 1926-2017

John Beer, Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge, was one of the pre-eminent Coleridgeans of modern times. A prolific scholar, he edited authoritative editions of both Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry and his theological and psychological works. He had a distinctive habit of publishing monographs in pairs: two on William Blake, two on William Wordsworth, two on theories of consciousness in Romantic and post-Romantic literature, as well as numerous books on Coleridge himself. His range extended back to the intellectual influences on Romanticism and forward to later writers—notably E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence—who in different ways might be numbered among the last Romantics.

Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 21