Life
1893-1979 [usually E. R. Dodds]; b. Belfast, ed. Campbell College, Belfast,
and in Scotland, Dublin, and Balliol Colelge, Oxford; taught classics
at Reading where he became friend of Louis MacNeice, and later his executor;
Chair of Greek at Oxford, 1936-1960; President of Society for Psychical
Research, 1961-63; lectured on Swan’s Hellenic Cruises in the 1960s;
also friend of Auden and Stephen MacKenna, whose Journals and Letters
he edited; ed. MacNiece, The Strings are False and Collected
Poems; published Selected Passages Illustrating Neo-Platonism (1923); The Greeks and the Irrational (1951); The Ancient Concept of
Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (1973); also
an autobiography, Missing Persons (1979), which won the Duff Cooper
Award. DIW DUB FDA
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References
Laurence Flanagan,
ed., The Darling of My Heart (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1994), incls. ‘When the ecstatic body grips [...] ’.
Notes
Louis MacNeice: In his character as Boyce, Dodds is described as ‘Twinkling Greek wisdom in his potting shed’,
in McNeice’s Autumn Sequel (1954).
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