Frequently Mentioned Texts

Peake, Mervyn. The Glassblowers. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950.

[Davis 7th Floor PR6031 .E183 G53 1950]

Largely based upon this slim collection of 35 poems, Mervyn Peake was awarded Britain's prestigious W.H. Heinemann Foundation Prize in 1950. The title The Glassblowers derives from Mervyn Peake's 1943 visit to a glassworks near Birmingham where Peake witnessed craftsmen hand-blowing radar cathode tubes. This book contains Peake's eponymous poem The Glassblowers along with several others of note: several love poems to his wife Maeve Gilmore, the haunting poem The Consumptive. Belsen 1945 concerning an infant who survived the Belsen concentration camp only to die of consumption in an Allied hospital following British liberation, and the poem entitled To Live at All is Miracle Enough which also happens to be the epitaph on Mervyn Peake's tombstone.

To see Mervyn Peake's extraordinary drawings as a World War II war artist, specifically those chronicling his interpretation of the Birmingham glassworks, visit the British Imperial War Museum website: http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/peake/p-intro.htm

Peake, Mervyn. Titus Groan. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969. (First edition 1946).

[Davis 7th Floor PR6031 .E183 T5 1968]

Anthony Burgess, in his introduction to Titus Groan, perhaps best sets summarizes the extraordinary prose and imagery rampant throughout the work, "The world created in Titus Groan is neither better nor worse that this one: it is merely different. It has absorbed our history, culture, and rituals and then stopped dead, refusing to move, self-feeding, self-motivating, self-enclosed. This is the world of Gormenghast." The epic first novel in the trio of Gormenghast books, frequently hailed as the masterwork of the three, covers the first year in the life of Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast. The novel reflects a painter's vision: page after page full of description and exposition overflowing with vivid, rich language. The decaying castle of Gormenghast, not the teaming populus of grotesque characters, may rightfully be the main character of the novel.

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