Ian Robinson (author)


Ian Robinson was a British literary critic and English lecturer.

Life and career

Robinson was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Retford, Nottinghamshire, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he was a pupil of F. R. Leavis and earned firsts in both parts of the English Tripos. Upon graduation in 1958, he supervised undergraduates at Downing alongside Leavis and Morris Shapira while undertaking graduate research on the metrics of Chaucer and medieval poetry. Awarded a research fellowship at the newly-established Churchill College in 1961, he soon left Cambridge to take up a post as lecturer in the English Department at University College, Swansea, where he remained until 1997.

Academic output

Best known for his 1973 book The Survival of English, Robinson has been a champion of traditional English literature and a critic of what he alleges to be the degeneration of the English language in modern life. With David Sims, he co-founded The Brynmill Press Ltd, in 1970, a company devoted to serious criticism which began with the quarterly review The Human World and went on to publish works of literary criticism, philosophy, fiction, and poetry.
Robinson's book The New Grammarians' Funeral was a critique of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar. It was well received by few linguists.
Robinson was a critic of the Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and Leavis tradition, as discussed in his book The English Prophets. Along with works of pure literary criticism on Chaucer, he has published much in a category he calls “criticism of language”, beginning with The Survival of English, which includes comments on the language of the media, of religion, of politics. He thinks that judgement is always a refinement of a sense held in common, and in 2008 published Holding the Centre, trying to demonstrate that a number of the Arts subjects have become incoherent by losing their place in the common language. He differed from his mentor Leavis by holding the view that judgement in literature cannot do without Christianity, and he has been a trustee of the Prayer Book Society.
He died on 30 October 2020, at the age of 83.

Books

Chaucer’s Prosody Chaucer and the English Tradition The Survival of English: Essays in criticism of language
  • With David Sims, The Decline and Fall of Mr Heath The New Grammarians’ Funeral Prayers for the New Babel Richard II and Woodstock .The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment The English Prophets: A critical defence of English criticism
  • With Duke Maskell, The New Idea of a University Chaucer and the English Tradition Who Killed the Bible? Holding the Centre Untied Kingdom
  • ''How to Read Shakespeare's Verse''