This document summarizes Peter Robinson's second Bateman Lecture given on March 30, 2016 at the University of Saskatchewan. The summary includes: 1) Robinson discussed Geoffrey Chaucer and his work from 1395. 2) He referenced a quote from Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote about history being "the mother of truth." 3) Robinson examined Max Harris' initial impressions of the poems of Ern Malley, who Harris believed to be a remarkable poetic figure, though the poems were later revealed to be a hoax.

1. Better than the original
Second Bateman Lecture
30 March 2016
Peter Robinson
peter.robinson@usask.ca

19. Geoffrey Chaucer
2016
Geoffrey Chaucer
1395

20. armee or ariuee

22. “…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar
and adviser to the present, and the future’s
counsellor”
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, 1605
“…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar
and adviser to the present, and the future’s
counsellor”
Don Quixote by Pierre Menard, c. 1920

31. • ..I was immediately impressed that here was a poet of
tremendous power, working through a disciplined and
restrained kind of statement into the deepest wells of human
experience. A poet, moreover, with cool, strong, sinuous
feeling for language
Max Harris’s first impressions of Ern Malley
a poet of tremendous energy, death-obsessed, sex-obsessed,
neurotic, mannered, expressionist, surrealist, modernist, a
phrase-maker with no fear of obscurity, and able to manoevre
a poem in several directions at once, as if he were taking
dictation at a conference of muses. He careered out of
control and then, with no warning, managed to do things only
real poets can

33. Harris to Ethel Malley
Your brother was one of the most remarkable
and important poetic figures of this country. It
may be rather hard for you to realize that Ern
was, in my opinion a great man, and in the
opinion of many people a major poet.

35. Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition

36. James McAuley, 1917-1976 Harold Stewart, 1916-1995

41. F W Bateson, 1961
If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre where
are Hamlet and Lycidas?

47. David Parker
Author, “The Living Text of the Gospels”
John Sentamu
Archbishop of York, 2005-

51. Monsignor Pier Francesco Fumagalli
Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan

53. John Donne.
St Paul’s Cathedral
29 January 1625