Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra (April 8, 1898 – July 4, 1971) was an English classical scholar, teacher, and wit.

Early life

He was born in Kiukiang, China to English parents. His father was Cecil Arthur Verner Bowra (1869-1947) of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. Maurice was educated at Cheltenham College, and New College, Oxford where he went in 1915. He served in the Royal Field Artillery from 1917, returning to Oxford to complete his degree.

Academic career

In 1922, he was appointed fellow of Wadham College, Oxford; he became Warden (head of the college) in 1938, and kept that post for the rest of his life. He was also Professor of Poetry 1946–1951 and vice chancellor 1951–1954. He was knighted in 1951.

He gave the 1955 Andrew Lang lecture.

In his long career as an Oxford don, Bowra had contact with a considerable portion of the English literary world, either as students or as colleagues. The character of Mr Samgrass in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is said to be modelled on Bowra, who was Waugh's teacher.

A close friend once commented that Bowra had cut himself off from posterity, "as his prose was unreadable and his verse was unprintable." This was set half-right by the publication in 2005 of New Bats in Old Belfries, a collection of satires on friends and enemies written between the 1920s and 1960s. Here is his parody of John Betjeman, who had become choked with emotion on being presented the Duff Cooper Prize by Princess Margaret in 1958:

"Green with lust and sick with shyness, / Let me lick your lacquered toes. / Gosh, oh gosh, your Royal Highness, / Put your finger up my nose Only you can make me happy. / Tuck me tight beneath your arm. / Wrap me in a woollen nappy; / Let me wet it till it's warm. / In a plush and plated pram / Wheel me round St James's, Ma'am [... Lightly plant your plimsolled heel / Where my privy parts congeal."

The Telegraph, echoing poet Cecil Day Lewis on the man himself, warned that the book, like strychnine, was best taken in small doses.^*

Quotations

"My dear, buggers can't be choosers." (explaining his marriage to a "plain" girl)

"I expect to pass through this world but once and therefore if there is anybody I want to kick in the crotch I had better kick them in the crotch now, for I do not expect to pass this way again."

"With one or two exceptions, colleges expect their players of games to be reasonably literate."

"Splendid couple – slept with both of them", (on hearing of the marriage of a well-known literary pair).

"Like our Lord and Socrates, he talked much but published little." (speaking of Isaiah Berlin)

In 1992, Wadham College named its new Bowra Building in his honour.

Books

• Pindar's Pythian Odes (1928) translator with H. T. Wade-Gery
• Oxford Book of Greek Verse (1930) editor with Gilbert Murray, Cyril Bailey, E. A. Barber and T. F. Higham
• Tradition and Design in the Iliad (1930)
• Ancient Greek Literature (1933)
• Pindari Carmina (1935)
• Greek Lyric Poetry: from Alcman to Simonides (Oxford 1936, 2nd revision 2001)
• Oxford Book of Greek Poetry in Translation (1937) editor with T. F. Higham
• Early Greek Elegists (1938) Martin Lectures at Oberlin College
• The Heritage of Symbolism (1943)
• A Book of Russian Verse (1943) editor
• Sophoclean Tragedy (1944)
• From Virgil to Milton (1945)
• The Creative Experiment (1949)
• The Romantic Imagination (1950)
• Heroic Poetry (1952)
• Problems in Greek Poetry (1953)
• Inspiration and Poetry (1955)
• Homer and his forerunners (Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, Edinburgh, 1955)
• The Greek Experience (1957)
• Primitive Song (1962)
• In General and Particular (1964)
• Pindar (1964)
• Landmarks in Greek Literature (1966)
• Poetry and Politics, 1900-1960 (1966) Wiles Lectures, The Queen's University, Belfast
• Memories 1898-1939 (1966)
• The Odes of Pindar (1969, Penguin reissue 1982) translator
• On Greek Margins (1970)
• Periclean Athens (1971)
• Homer (1972)
• Anthology of Russian Poems

References

• Hugh Lloyd-Jones (ed.), Maurice Bowra: A Celebration (London, 1974)
• Noel Annan, The Dons (Chicago, 1999)
• Ben Rogers, A. J. Ayer: A Life (Vintage, 2000) has interesting passages on Bowra

1898 births | 1971 deaths | Old Cheltonians | Former students of New College, Oxford | Classical scholars