Sir Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh (born Sept. 5, 1861, London—died May 13, 1922, Oxford) was a Scottish man of letters and critic who was a prominent figure at the University of Oxford in his time.

He held the chair of modern literature at Liverpool (1889–1900) and of English at Glasgow and was appointed Oxford’s first professor of English literature in 1904. Raleigh was a brilliant and stimulating talker and lecturer and became the centre of the Oxford English school, which had not been established until 1894. His books (Style, 1897; Wordsworth, 1903; Shakespeare, 1907; Six Essays on Johnson, 1910) are the essays not of an exact scholar but of an urbane critic, sensitive without eccentricity, impressionistic and intuitive, synthetic rather than analytic. He was knighted in 1911.