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David Anthony Wevill (born 1935) is a Japanese-born Canadian poet and translator. He became a dual citizen ( American and Canadian ) in 1994. Wevill is a professor emeritus in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin .
Wevill, a secretary-turned-copywriter, was deprived, or perhaps deprived herself, of the liberty of being nobody by colliding, in 1961, with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, two of poetry’s eternal somebodies. Within months of that meeting, Hughes left Plath, apparently for Wevill, though family and biographers still debate his reasons.
Wevill's poetry weaves an intricate mixture of cultural legend and autobiographical reflection in which he sets the understanding of his own life, its joys and various personal difficulties, against the suffering of other artists (Ezra Pound, Robert Schumann, Yasunari Kawabata) as if they are conduits to the solace that he seems to crave.
David Wevill was born a Canadian in Japan in 1935, and was educated in both Canada and England. He has lived in Burma and in Spain but has made his home in Austin, Texas for the past thirty years.
David Wevill is not an easy poet to sum up. His work ranges from the prose poem to traditional stanzaic poetry, to the open field poetics of the activated page, but however the river of his words flows, whether in turbulent rapids or in slow swells, the poems dazzle.
David Wevill. Canadian poet and translator, Wevill first made a name for himself as a poet when he was included in A. Alvarez's anthology The New Poetry (Penguin, 1962). In 1963 Wevill was showcased in A Group Anthology (Oxford University Press).
David Wevill took the title for his collection Where the Arrow Falls from a North American Indian legend that told the story of three brothers who shot arrows into the air on the promise that they would build their kingdoms on the spots where the projectiles landed.
