Richard Wollheim as Poet

Richard Wollheim (1923–2003) was a British philosopher whose work made significant contributions to our understandings of the fields of aesthetics and psychoanalysis, while at the same time developing a distinctive set of ideas about what it means, and what it is, to live the life of a person. Wollheim’s renown as a philosopher reached its highest point in the 1980s, with the publication of arguably his two most important works, The Thread of Life (1984) and Painting as an Art (1987), which were based on lecture series given at Harvard and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC respectively. Wollheim’s oeuvre is considerable – a comprehensive bibliography has not yet been assembled – and comprises, in addition to several monographs and essay collections, a large number of occasional pieces.

By far the least-known area of Wollheim’s corpus, though, is that which may be grouped under the category of ‘literature’. Only two works of this kind have hitherto been published: a novel, A Family Romance (1969), and an acclaimed memoir of his childhood, Germs (2004, posthumously). However, there exist among Wollheim’s papers drafts of short stories, an unfinished social novel set in Ireland, and two notebooks of poetry written between 1938 and 1944, with the majority written in 1940. The printing of this selection in PN Review represents, to our knowledge, the first time that any of Wollheim’s verse has been published.


As anyone who has read him will attest, Wollheim is difficult to place as a philosopher. After undergraduate study at Oxford in History and ...