Christopher Logue facts for kids

Christopher Logue, who was awarded the CBE, was an English poet. He was born on November 23, 1926, and passed away on December 2, 2011. He was also a pacifist, meaning he believed strongly in peace and was against war.

Life

Christopher Logue was born and grew up in Portsmouth, a city in Hampshire, England. He was the only child of John and Molly Logue. He went to Roman Catholic schools, including St John's College, Portsmouth and Prior Park College. Later, he attended Portsmouth Grammar School.

After school, he joined the Black Watch, a famous army regiment. He was sent to Palestine.

In 1958, Christopher Logue joined the first of the Aldermaston Marches. These were peaceful protests organized by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War. People marched to show they were against nuclear weapons. He was also part of the Committee of 100, another group that protested against nuclear weapons.

He was friends for many years with a writer and translator named Austryn Wainhouse. They wrote many letters to each other over the decades.

Career

Christopher Logue was a talented writer for plays and movies, and he also acted in films. He wrote screenplays for movies like Savage Messiah and The End of Arthur's Marriage. He also wrote for Private Eye magazine for many years, from 1962 to 1993. He contributed to Alexander Trocchi's literary magazine, Merlin.

In 2005, Logue won the Whitbread Poetry Award for his book of poems called Cold Calls.

Poetry and Music

Early in his career, Christopher Logue became popular for his version of Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems. This was broadcast on BBC Radio in 1959. Logue read the poems himself, and they were set to jazz music. A recording of this performance was later released as a record called "Red Bird: Jazz and Poetry."

One of his poems, Be Not Too Hard, was turned into a song by Donovan. It was featured in the 1967 film Poor Cow. The famous singer Joan Baez also made the song popular on her 1967 album, Joan. Another song based on the same poem was performed by Manfred Mann's Earth Band in 1974.

Another well-known poem by Logue is Come to the Edge. People often mistakenly think it was written by Guillaume Apollinaire. However, Logue actually wrote it for a poster advertising an exhibition about Apollinaire. He titled it "Apollinaire Said," which led to the confusion.

Major Works

Christopher Logue's last big project was rewriting Homer's Iliad in a modern style. The Iliad is a very old Greek poem about the Trojan War. Logue's version was published in several smaller books. One of these, Homer: War Music, was nominated for the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002.

He also wrote an autobiography, which is a book about his own life, called Prince Charming (1999).

Logue's poems often had short, powerful lines and were sometimes about politics. For example, in his poem Song of Autobiography, he wrote:

I, Christopher Logue, was baptised the year
Many thousands of Englishmen,
Fists clenched, their bellies empty,
Walked day and night on the capital city.

This shows his interest in social issues.

Film and Television Work

As a writer, he wrote a short song for the film A High Wind in Jamaica (1965). He also wrote the screenplay for Savage Messiah (1972). For television, he wrote a version of Antigone (1962) and a short play called The End of Arthur's Marriage (1965). This play, directed by Ken Loach, looked at how people in Britain cared a lot about owning property and how animals were treated.

Christopher Logue also appeared as an actor in several films. He played Cardinal Richelieu in Ken Russell's film The Devils (1971). He was also in Prisoner of Honor (1991) and played a spaghetti-eating character in Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky (1977).

Family

Christopher Logue married the biographer Rosemary Hill in 1985. He passed away on December 2, 2011, at the age of 85.

Works

• Patrocleia, University of Michigan Press, 1963
• Ode to the dodo: poems from 1953 to 1978, Cape, 1981
• Kings: An Account of Books 1 and 2 of Homer's Iliad Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1991
• The Husbands: An Account of Books 3 and 4 of Homer's Iliad Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995
• Selected poems, Faber and Faber, 1996
• Cold calls: war music continued, Volume 1, Faber and Faber, 2005

Prose

• Prince Charming: a memoir, Faber and Faber, 1999; Faber, 2001

See also

In Spanish: Christopher Logue para niños