Peter Dale Scott

Peter Dale Scott (born 11 January 1929) is a Canadian-born poet, academic, and diplomat.

A son of the Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott and painter Marian Dale Scott, he is best known for his critiques of deep politics and American foreign policy since the era of the Vietnam War. Although trained as a political scientist, Scott holds an atypical academic appointment as a poet-scholar in an English department.

After receiving undergraduate degrees in philosophy (first-class honours) and political science (second-class honours) from McGill University in 1949, he studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (1949) and University College, Oxford (1950-1952) before receiving a Ph.D. in political science from McGill (with a dissertation on the social and political philosophy of T.S. Eliot) in 1955. He briefly taught in McGill's political science department and spent four years (1957–1961) with the Canadian diplomatic service before joining the speech department of the University of California, Berkeley as a lecturer in 1961. He was subsequently promoted to assistant professor of speech (1962), associate professor of English (1968), and professor of English (1980); since his nominal retirement in 1994, he has served as professor emeritus of English.

Notably, he was a signatory in 1968 of the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, in which participants vowed to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

In terms of poetry, he is best known for his book-length epic poem Coming to Jakarta (subtitled "a poem about terror"), which describes in measured, prosodically regular verse the 1965 crisis in Indonesia that resulted in the Indonesian Civil War and the deaths of as many as half a million people, in which he believed the CIA to have played a role.

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