Hobsbaum was born into a Polish
Jewish family in
London, and brought up in
Bradford,
Yorkshire, where he attended
Belle Vue Boys' Grammar School. He read English at
Downing College, Cambridge, where he was taught and heavily influenced by
F. R. Leavis. At Cambridge he took over the editing of the magazine
delta from
Peter Redgrove. After Cambridge, he worked as a school teacher in London from 1955 to 1959, when he moved to
Sheffield to study for a PhD under
William Empson. In 1962, he took up an academic position at
Queen's University, Belfast, and moved again in 1966, to take up a post in the
University of Glasgow. He was awarded a personal chair in 1985, and retired from the university in 1997; he remained in Glasgow until his death in 2005.
The Group(s) Hobsbaum's most direct impact on literature was as the animating force behind
The Group, a sequence of writing workshops in Cambridge, London,
Belfast and
Glasgow, in turn. Although there was some slight overlap in personnel with
The Movement, the various incarnations of the Group had a more concrete existence and a more practical focus. The Cambridge Group was initially concerned with the oral performance of poetry, but soon turned into an exercise in
practical criticism and mutual support for a network of poets. This Group relocated to London when Hobsbaum moved there in 1955, becoming
The Group, and continuing until 1965, chaired by
Edward Lucie-Smith after Hobsbaum's departure for Sheffield. On arriving in Sheffield (c.1959–1962), he immediately organized the "Writers' Group" for the university's undergraduates and started
Poetry from Sheffield, a magazine for their poetry but which also had poems by
George MacBeth,
Peter Redgrove and
Francis Berry. He wrote about the group in
The Times Literary Supplement, published on 14 April 1961. Barry Fox took over the chair when Hobsbaum left to concentrate on his thesis. In Belfast (1962–1966), Hobsbaum organised a new weekly discussion group, which became known as
The Belfast Group and included the emerging authors
John Bond,
Seamus Heaney,
Michael Longley,
Derek Mahon,
Stewart Parker and
Bernard MacLaverty. In Glasgow, Hobsbaum became once again the nucleus of a group of new and distinctive authors, including
Alasdair Gray,
Liz Lochhead,
James Kelman,
Tom Leonard,
Aonghas MacNeacail and
Jeff Torrington. This group continued to meet until 1975, and unlike the previous groups developed a more pronounced focus on prose than on poetry. As an encore, Hobsbaum was instrumental in setting up, in 1995, the successful
MLitt in
creative writing at the University of Glasgow.
Work Though he was a poet as well, it was as a critic that Hobsbaum was best known. Although as one of his obituarists noted, "[h]e was famously not a man who felt a pressing need to endear himself to students", he was a charismatic teacher, and fiercely committed to those with a commitment to literature. The dedication of Alasdair Gray's
The Book of Prefaces is "to Philip Hobsbaum poet, critic and servant of servants of art". Seamus Heaney also dedicated the poem "Blackberry-Picking" (from
Death of a Naturalist, 1966) to Philip Hobsbaum.
Poetry •
A Group Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1963), edited with Edward Lucie-Smith • ''The Place's Fault, and other poems'' (Macmillan, 1964) •
Snapshots (Belfast: Festival Publications, 1967) •
In Retreat and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1966) •
Coming Out Fighting (Macmillan, 1969) •
Women and Animals (Macmillan, 1972) •
The Pattern of Poetry (1962)
Criticism and other academic writing •
Ten Elizabethan Poets (Longmans, 1969), editor •
A Theory of Communication (Macmillan, 1970), in US as
Theory of Criticism (Indiana University Press, 1970) • ''A Reader's Guide To Charles Dickens'' (Thames and Hudson, 1972) •
Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry (Macmillan, 1979) • ''A Reader's Guide to D H Lawrence'' (Thames and Hudson, 1981) •
Essentials Of Literary Criticism (Thames and Hudson, 1983) • ''A Reader's Guide to Robert Lowell'' (Thames and Hudson, 1988) •
William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry and Prose (Routledge, 1989), editor •
Channels of Communication: Papers from the Conference of Higher Education Teachers of English (Dept Eng Lit, University of Glasgow, 1992), edited by Hobsbaum, Paddy Lyons, and Jim McGhee •
Metre, Rhythm And Verse Form (Routledge, 1996) • Entries in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for Peter Alexander, William Burnaby, Richard Thomas Church, Everard Guilpin, Alfred Noyes, (James) Stewart Parker, and William Stewart Rose (2004). ==References==