This document summarizes Peter Robinson's second Bateman Lecture given on March 30, 2016 at the University of Saskatchewan. The summary includes:
1) Robinson discussed Geoffrey Chaucer and his work from 1395.
2) He referenced a quote from Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote about history being "the mother of truth."
3) Robinson examined Max Harris' initial impressions of the poems of Ern Malley, who Harris believed to be a remarkable poetic figure, though the poems were later revealed to be a hoax.
22. “…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar
and adviser to the present, and the future’s
counsellor”
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, 1605
“…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar
and adviser to the present, and the future’s
counsellor”
Don Quixote by Pierre Menard, c. 1920
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31. • ..I was immediately impressed that here was a poet of
tremendous power, working through a disciplined and
restrained kind of statement into the deepest wells of human
experience. A poet, moreover, with cool, strong, sinuous
feeling for language
Max Harris’s first impressions of Ern Malley
a poet of tremendous energy, death-obsessed, sex-obsessed,
neurotic, mannered, expressionist, surrealist, modernist, a
phrase-maker with no fear of obscurity, and able to manoevre
a poem in several directions at once, as if he were taking
dictation at a conference of muses. He careered out of
control and then, with no warning, managed to do things only
real poets can
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33. Harris to Ethel Malley
Your brother was one of the most remarkable
and important poetic figures of this country. It
may be rather hard for you to realize that Ern
was, in my opinion a great man, and in the
opinion of many people a major poet.