Paul Hugh Howard Potts (19 July 1911 – 26 August 1990), a British-born poet who lived in British Columbia in his youth,[1][2] was the author of Dante Called You Beatrice (1960), a memoir of unrequited love. One of the women treated in the memoir was Jean Hore, who married the writer Philip O'Connor but ended up confined as a schizophrenic for over fifty years until her death.[3][4][5]

Potts was born in Datchet, Berkshire[6] to (Arthur George) Howard Potts (1869-1918), who had emigrated to Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where he was a partner in a bakery and confectionery business,[7] and his Irish wife Julia Helen Kavanagh (also recorded as Cavanagh).[8] Arthur Potts's father, Dr Walter Jeffery Potts (1837-1898),[9] had married Julia, daughter of Sir Thomas Branthwaite Beevor, 3rd Baronet;[10] many descendants with the name 'Beevor-Potts' live in Canada.[11][12][13]

He was educated in Canada, England (at Stonyhurst until the age of sixteen[14]) and Italy (at a Jesuit college in Florence),[15] but from the early 1930s he lived in London. He frequented the Soho-Fitzrovia area where he would sell broadsheet copies of his poetry in the streets and pubs.[16][17]

Among Potts's literary friends were George Orwell and the English poet George Barker.[18][19][20] Potts's memoir of Orwell, "Don Quixote on a Bicycle", appeared in The London Magazine in 1957[21][22] and became a chapter of Dante Called You Beatrice. His 1948 essay “The World of George Barker” appeared in Poetry Quarterly.[23]

In late middle-age, Potts was '...balding' with 'a stutter that he mixed with rapid blinking and an amused chuckle as he started a sentence', eventually becoming a dissolute figure 'barred from Soho pubs'.[24] Potts died in 1990 of smoke inhalation from a fire in his bedroom; he had been house-bound for some years.[25]

Bibliography

• (1940) A Poet's Testament, with drawings by Cliff Bayliss and Scott MacGregor, foreword by Hugh MacDiarmid
• (1944) Instead of a Sonnet (enlarged 1978)
• (1960) Dante Called You Beatrice
• (1970) To Keep A Promise
• (1973) Invitation to a Sacrament
• (2006) Ronald Caplan (ed.), George Orwell's Friend: Selected Writings by Paul Potts

See also

• Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969)
• Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse (1953)
• New Lyrical Ballads (1945)

Notes and references

Further reading

• Latona, Robert, "Happily Never After, or, The Rubbish Tower", New Partisan.
• "Guide to the Paul Potts Papers", Northwestern University Library, Evanston, IL