John E. Matthias is an American poet living in South Bend, Indiana and an emeritus faculty member at the University of Notre Dame.

Although his main academic job has been at the University of Notre Dame, he has spent much of his professional life in Britain, where he did major scholarly work on the Anglo-Welsh poet and painter David Jones, editing both the poetry and essays on Jones's work for Faber and Faber, the National Poetry Foundation, and University of Wales Press.

There he met several contemporaries who became life-long friends, especially Joel Barkan, a scholar of African and American politics, who appears in his poems and in his novel, Different Kinds of Music.

Matthias was for twenty years co-editor, with William O’Rourke, of the Notre Dame Review, an international literary journal, and he continues on the magazine as Editor at Large.

During his early years at Notre Dame, Matthias was closely associated with poets Peter Michelson and, in Chicago, Michael Anania, who was his first editor at Swallow Press.

A third Notre Dame collaboration was with Serbian mathematician and poet Vladeta Vučković on a translation of the epic fragments known collectively as The Battle of Kosovo (1999).

During much of his time in Britain, Matthias led basically a non-academic, even an anti-academic life, living for the most part at his wife's house in the small village of Hacheston, Suffolk.

and Other Questions (2011); At Large (Shearsman Books, 2016); “Living With A Visionary” (New Yorker Magazine, 2021) Novels Different Kinds of Music (2014) Plays Six Short Plays (2016) Translations Contemporary Swedish Poetry (1980) (with Göran Printz-Påhlson); Jan Östergren: Rainmaker (1983) (with Göran Printz-Påhlson); The Battle of Kosovo (1987) (with Vladeta Vučković); Three-Toed Gull: Selected Poems of Jesper Svenbro (2003) (with Lars-Håkan Svensson) Editions 23 Modern British Poets (1971); Introducing David Jones (1980); David Jones: Man and Poet (1989); Selected Works of David Jones (1992); Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years (2009) (with William O’Rourke)