Christopher Logue

Christopher Logue, CBE (born 23 November 1926 in Portsmouth, Hampshire) is an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival. He has also written for the theatre and cinema as well as acting in a number of films. His two screenplays are Savage Messiah and The End of Arthur's Marriage. He was also a long-term contributor to Private Eye magazine, as well as writing for the Merlin literary journal of Alexander Trocchi. He won the 2005 Whitbread Poetry Award for Cold Calls.

His early popularity was marked by the release of a loose adaptation of Pablo Neruda's "Twenty Love Poems", later released as an extended play recording, "Red Bird: Jazz and Poetry", backed by a Jazz group led by Tony Kinsey.

One of his poems, "Be Not Too Hard" was set to music by Donovan, and made popular by Joan Baez, from her 1967 album Joan. Donovan's version appeared in the film Poor Cow (1967).

His major poetical work is an ongoing project to render Homer's Iliad into a modernist idiom. This work is published in a number of small books, usually equating to two or three books of the original text. (The volume entitled Homer: War Music was shortlisted for the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize.) He has also published an autobiography called Prince Charming (1999).

His lines tend to be short, pithy and frequently political, as in Song of Autobiography:

I, Christopher Logue, was baptized the year

Many thousands of Englishmen,

Fists clenched, their bellies empty,

Walked day and night on the capital city.

He wrote the couplet that is sung at the beginning and end of the 1965 film A High Wind in Jamaica, the screenplay for Savage Messiah (1972), a television version of Antigone (1962), and a short play for the TV series The Wednesday Play titled The End of Arthur's Marriage (1965).

He has also appeared in a number of films as an actor, most notably as Cardinal Richelieu in Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils and as the spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam's 1977 film Jabberwocky.

Logue wrote for the Olympia Press under the pseudonym, Count Palmiro Vicarion, including a pornographic novel, Lust.^[1]

Logue is married to the biographer Rosemary Hill.

Notes

1. ^ Logue in Vogue; The Guardian January 22, 2006

External links

• Christopher Logue at the Academy of American Poets
• Shusha Guppy (Summer 1993). "Christopher Logue, The Art of Poetry No. 66". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1929/the-art-of-poetry-no-66-christopher-logue. 
• Essay on Logue's Homer
• Bibliography from the USC College of Liberal Arts
• Profile in The Independent (UK)
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography, including audio clip
• A blog page on the Red Bird recordings.

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Name	Logue, Christopher
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Date of birth	23 November 1926
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