Scott, Geoffrey

(1883-1929)

   Born in Hampstead, London, the son of Russell Scott, a prosperous businessman, he was educated at Rugby School and graduated literae humaniores from New College, Oxford, in 1907. From 1907 to 1909 he was secretary-librarian to Bernhard Berenson, the American art critic who lived in Italy. From about 1909, he worked with Cecil Pinsent, an English architect who designed and built Tuscan villas and gardens for the English speaking community in Tuscany. In 1914 Scott published The Architecture of Humanism, a work that influenced a whole generation of architects. He became honorary first secretary at the British embassy in Rome in 1915. In October 1927 he sailed to New York to begin the task of editing an important collection of James Boswell's papers that had been bought by Colonel R.H. Isham, an American. The eighteen volumes were published between 1928 and 1934. He died in New York and his ashes were placed in the cloisters at New College, Oxford. Some of his poems: "All Our Joy is Enough," "Boats of Cane," "The Singer in the Noon," "The Skaian Gate," "What Are the Ghosts of Trees?" "What Was Solomon's Mind?"

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Poems of Geoffrey Scott. Oxford University Press, 1931. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. William Butler Yeats, ed. Oxford University Press, 1936. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.