16 Facts About Sherard Vines

Walter Sherard Vines, known as Sherard Vines, was an English author and academic.

Sherard Vines began publishing poetry in the 1910s, then in the 1920s spent five years teaching at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan.

Sherard Vines's works include The Course of English Classicism from the Tudor to Victorian Age, a study of classicism in British art; Yofuku, or, Japan in Trousers, a travel book about his experiences in Japan which was critical of aspects of Japanese culture; and A Hundred Years of English Literature, a survey of the literature of Britain, the British Empire and the United States.

Sherard Vines attended Magdalen College School and New College, Oxford.

Sherard Vines held an academic position at Belfast University until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

Sherard Vines served in the Highland Light Infantry until 1917, when he was wounded and forced to return to civilian life.

Sherard Vines joined him in England, and gave birth to a daughter, Jeannine in 1922.

Sherard Vines was invited to Keio by Junzaburo Nishiwaki, whom he had met in England and who later translated some of his works into Japanese.

In 1924 and 1925 Sherard Vines contributed short stories to Blunden's Oriental Literary Times.

Sherard Vines's verse is remarkable for the piercing violence with which it expresses the disenchantment of one for whom the world has become divested of value.

Sherard Vines returned to Europe in 1928 to take up a position as Professor of English at University College Hull.

George Orwell, reviewing the book in the New Adelphi, noted that Sherard Vines viewed poetry as "a thing of wit, grandeur and good sense, not of 'magic' and seductive sounds", and praised Sherard Vines' "admirable account of the main drift of classicism".

In 1930 Vines he married his second wife, Agnes Rennie Cumming; their daughter, Rennie J Vines, was born in 1933.

Sherard Vines described the typical Japanese student as "personally as a rule most charming, and sometimes a trifle pathetic", and noted divergent attitudes among Japanese people toward foreigners.

In 1950 Sherard Vines published A Hundred Years of English Literature, a survey of literature produced in the United Kingdom, United States and British Empire from around 1830.

Sherard Vines remained at Hull until his retirement in 1952, and died in 1974.