Ruthven Todd

Ruthven Campbell Todd (Pronounced 'riven') (14 June 1914 – 1978) was a Scottish poet, artist and novelist, best known as an editor of the works of William Blake, and as a writer of children's books. He wrote also under the pseudonym R. T. Campbell.

Biography

Born in Edinburgh, Todd was educated at Fettes College and Edinburgh School of Art. After a time in the office of his father, an architect, he worked for two years as an agricultural labourer on Mull. He then started a career in copy-writing and journalism, while writing poetry and novels, living in Edinburgh, London, and later Tilty Mill near Dunmow in Essex (later rented to poet and novelist Elizabeth Smart).

He was involved with the surrealists at the time of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition. During the 1930s, he was friendly with Wyndham Lewis, contributing to the Lewis issue of Julian Symons's Twentieth Century Verse, and recruited him to keep the dozing Ezra Pound, whose portrait Lewis was painting. A character based on Todd was included in Symons' first detective story, The Immaterial Murder Case.) During World War II he was a conscientious objector. He moved to America in 1947, where he held a position at a university in New York, and ran the Weekend Press during the 1950s. He contributed to children's literature, with the fifties Space Cat series.

He was married to sculptor Joellen Hall Rapée (1921-2006). In 1958, he settled in Majorca, Spain. He spent the remainder of his life there until his death in 1978.

Volumes

Space Cat (1952)

• Poems (1938)
• The Laughing Mulatto (1939)
• Over the Mountain (1939)
• Poets of Tomorrow (1939)
• Ten Poems (1940)
• Until Now (1942) Fortune Press, poems
• Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist (1942) editor
• Poems for a Penny (1942)
• The Acreage of the Heart (1943) poems
• The Lost Traveller (1943)
• The Planet in my Hand (1944, Grey Walls Press) poems
• Tracks in the Snow (Grey Walls Press) (1946) criticism of William Blake, Fuseli and John Martin
• Unholy Dying (1945) as R. T. Campbell
• First Animal Book (1946) Thomas Bewick engravings
• Take thee a Sharp Knife (1946) as R. T. Campbell
• Adventure with a Goat (1946) as R. T. Campbell
• Bodies in a Bookshop (1946) as R. T. Campbell
• Death for Madame (1946) as R. T. Campbell
• The Death Cup (1946) as R. T. Campbell
• Swing Low Sweet Death (1946) as R. T. Campbell
• William Blake: America, a prophecy (1947) editor
• William Blake: Poems (1947) editor
• A Century of British Painters (1947) editor, original authors Richard Redgrave and Samuel Redgrave
• Christopher Smart: A Song to David (1947) editor
• In Other Worlds (1951)
• Love Poems for the New Year (1951)
• Space Cat (1952)
• Loser's Choice (1953) as R. T. Campbell
• The Tropical Fish Book (1953)
• Indian Spring (1954)
• A Mantelpiece of Shells (1954)
• Trucks, Tractors, and Trailers (1954)
• Indian Pipe (1955)
• Space Cat Visits Venus (1955)
• Space Cat Meets Mars (1957)
• Space Cat and the Kittens (1958)
• Tan's Fish (1958)
• Selected Poems of William Blake (1960) editor
• Funeral of a Child (1962)
• Garland for the Winter Solstice (1961) selected poems
• The Geography of Faces (1964)
• Blake's Dante Plates (1968) editor
• William Blake: The Artist (1971)
• John Berryman 1914-1972 (1972) broadsheet
• Lament of the Cats of Rapallo (1973)
• McGonagall Remembers Fitzrovia in the 1930s (1973)