Sebastian Barker

Sebastian Smart Barker FRSL (16 April 1945 – 31 January 2014) was a British poet notable for a visionary manner that has been compared to William Blake in its use of the long ecstatic line and its "ability to write lyric poetry which used simple words to encapsulate profound meanings".

His career included stints as a furniture restorer, carpenter, fireman and cataloguer at Sotheby's, and is summed up by his autobiographical poem "Curriculum Vitae".

[4][3] His earlier collections, which include On the Rocks (Martin, Brian & O'Keeffe 1977), and A Nuclear Epiphany (Friday Night Fish Publications, 1984) were brought together in a volume of selected poems, Guarding the Border, published by Enitharmon Press in 1992.

In August 2010, Barker contributed to an eBook collection of political poems entitled Emergency Verse – Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State edited by Alan Morrison.

[5] At Oxford, he knew the Scottish writer Eddie Linden, who went on to become editor of the poetry magazine Aquarius, and was encouraged by Barker's mother Elizabeth.

[1] He defended a vatic or mystical view of poetic creation, and in a poem such as "Holy the Heart on which We Hang Our Hope" he explored "the way a mortal may interact with the divine, in which the obsessive attention demanded by the subject is mirrored in the use of a form developed from the repetitions of a villanelle.