Robert Calverly Trevelyan (28 June 1872 – 21 March 1951) was an English poet and translator, of a traditionalist sort, and a follower of the lapidary style of Logan Pearsall Smith

Logan Pearsall Smith

Logan Pearsall Smith was an American-born essayist and critic.Smith was born in Millville, New Jersey the son of the prominent Quakers Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith. His father's family had become wealthy from its glass factories...

.

Life

Trevelyan was the second son of Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet

Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet

Sir George Otto Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet OM, PC was a British statesman and author. In a ministerial career stretching almost 30 years, he was most notably twice Secretary of State for Scotland under William Ewart Gladstone and the Earl of Rosebery...

 and his wife Caroline née Philips, who was the daughter of Robert Needham Philips

Robert Needham Philips

Robert Needham Philips DL was an English merchant and manufacturer in the Lancashire textiles business, a Liberal Party politician, and the grandfather of the Whig historian G. M...

 MP, a Liberal Member of Parliament

Member of Parliament

A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...

 and textile merchant from Lancashire. Trevelyan was the brother of Sir Charles Trevelyan, 3rd Baronet

Sir Charles Trevelyan, 3rd Baronet

Sir Charles Philips Trevelyan, 3rd Baronet PC , the Lord Lieutenant of Northumberland, was a British Liberal, and later Labour, politician and landowner...

, and the historian G. M. Trevelyan

G. M. Trevelyan

George Macaulay Trevelyan, OM, CBE, FRS, FBA , was a British historian. Trevelyan was the third son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and great-nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose staunch liberal Whig principles he espoused in accessible works of literate narrative avoiding a...

.

He was born in Weybridge

Weybridge

Weybridge is a town in the Elmbridge district of Surrey in South East England. It is bounded to the north by the River Thames at the mouth of the River Wey, from which it gets its name...

, and educated at Harrow

Harrow School

Harrow School, commonly known simply as "Harrow", is an English independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London.. The school is of worldwide renown. There is some evidence that there has been a school on the site since 1243 but the Harrow School we know today was...

. From 1891 to 1895 he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge

Trinity College, Cambridge

Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...

, being one of the Cambridge Apostles

Cambridge Apostles

The Cambridge Apostles, also known as the Cambridge Conversazione Society, is an intellectual secret society at the University of Cambridge founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, a Cambridge student who went on to become the first Bishop of Gibraltar....

. He studied classics and then law; his father wanted him to follow a career as a barrister

Barrister

A barrister is a member of one of the two classes of lawyer found in many common law jurisdictions with split legal professions. Barristers specialise in courtroom advocacy, drafting legal pleadings and giving expert legal opinions...

, but his ambition was to be a poet.

Described as a "rumpled, eccentric poet", and sometimes considered a rather ineffectual person, he was close to the Bloomsbury Group

Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...

, who called him 'Bob Trevy'. He had a wide further range of social connections: George Santayana

George Santayana

George Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters...

 from 1905; Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet of the First World War who was considered to be one of the greatest of all English war poets...

; Bernard Berenson

Bernard Berenson

Bernard Berenson was an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. He was a major figure in pioneering art attribution and therefore establishing the market for paintings by the "Old Masters".-Personal life:...

; G. E. Moore; E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...

 with whom he and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson , was a British historian and political activist. He led most of his life at Cambridge, where he wrote a dissertation on Neoplatonism before becoming a fellow. He was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.A noted pacifist, Dickinson protested against Britain's...

  travelled to India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 in 1912. His pacifist principles extended to sheltering John Rodker

John Rodker

John Rodker was a British writer, modernist poet, and publisher of some of the major modernist figures. He was born in Manchester into a Jewish immigrant family, who moved to London while he was still young.-Career:...

 during World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

.

He married the Dutch musician Elizabeth van der Hoeven; the artist Julian Trevelyan

Julian Trevelyan

Julian Otto Trevelyan, RA was a British artist and poet.Trevelyan was the only child of Robert Calverley Trevelyan and his wife Elizabeth van der Hoeven...

 was their son.

Works

Trevelyan wrote a number of verse plays; The Bride of Dionysus (1912) was made into an opera by Sir Donald Tovey.

List of works

• Mallow and Asphodel (1898) poems
• Polyphemus and Other Poems (1901)
• Sisyphus: An Operatic Fable. (1908)
• The Bride of Dionysus a music-Drama and Other Poems (1912)
• The New Parsifal: An Operatic Fable (1914)
• The Foolishness of Solomon (1915)
• The Pterodamozels: An Operatic Fable. (1916)
• The Death of Man (1919) poems
• Translations from Lucretius (1920)
• The Oresteia of Aeschylus (1922) translator
• The Antigone of Sophocles (1924) translator
• The Ajax of Sophocles
• The Idylls of Theocritus (1925) translator
• Poems and Fables (Hogarth Press
  Hogarth Press
  The Hogarth Press was founded in 1917 by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books....
  
  , 1925)
• Thamyris: Is There a Future for Poetry? (1925) polemic
• The Deluge & Other Poems (Hogarth Press, 1926)
• Meleager (Hogarth Press, 1927)
• Three Plays: Sulla - Fand - The Pearl Tree (Hogarth Press, 1931)
• Rimeless Numbers (Hogarth Press, 1932)
• Selected Poems (1934)
• Beelzebub (Hogarth Press, 1935)
• De Rerum Natura by Lucretius (1937) translator
• The Collected Works of R. C. Trevelyan (1939) two volumes
• Aftermath (Hogarth Press, 1941)
• Translations from Leopardi (1941)
• Translations from Horace, Juvenal, & Montaigne. With Two Imaginary Conversations (1941)
• The Eclogues and the Georgics of Virgil (1944) translator
• Windfalls: Notes & Essays (1944)
• From the Chinese (1945) translator
• Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus (1946) translator
• From the Shiffolds (Hogarth Press, 1947)
• Translations from Latin Poetry (1949)
• Translations from Greek Poetry (1950)

External links

• The Robert Calverley Trevelyan fonds at the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto consists of twelve letters written to Mrs. Rosebery concerning writing, travel, friends, social activities and other matters.