John Matthias

John Matthias is an American poet. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1941. Matthias attended the Ohio State University and Stanford University. While still in high school, he studied with John Berryman at a summer writing conference at the University of Utah in 1959 and kept in touch with Berryman for the rest of the latter's life. While in graduate school at Stanford he studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters but did not conform to Winters' stringent anti-modernist position. In fact, Matthias became deeply interested in modernism, especially British modernism, which he came to know well during many years of residence in England, editing the anthology 23 Modern British Poets in 1970, a groundbreaking personal intervention. His peers at Stanford included two future poets laureate of the United States, Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, as well as the poets Ken Fields, James McMichael, and John Peck. When he left Stanford in 1966, he spent a year in London as a Fulbright Scholar where he met Diana Adams, and married her a year later. Diana's distinguished family includes several artists and writers, including her brother-in-law Wayland Young (Lord Kennet), the sculptor Emily Young, and the novelist Louisa Young. Many of Matthias’s poems deal with this family. In 1976 Matthias became a Visiting Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and has since 1977 been a Life Member. 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’ work for Faber and Faber, the National Poetry Foundation, and University of Wales Press.

Matthias’s own family comes from the world of Ohio politics. His father, John M. Matthias, was a justice of the Ohio Supreme Court who followed his own father, Edward S. Matthias, on the high court bench. His mother, Lois Kirkpatrick Matthias, taught elementary school at the Ohio State University lab school where Matthias himself was a pupil from first grade to senior high school. 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.

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