Denis Saurat
Denis Saurat (21 March 1890 – 7 June 1958) was an Anglo-French scholar, writer, and broadcaster on a wide range of topics, including explaining French society and culture to the English and what he called "philosophical poetry." Biography He was born in Toulouse and died in Nice, France, but his most active years were spent in London, England. His views on the connection in the early modern period between the poetry of Edmund Spenser and John Milton and the occult, represented in particular by the Kabbalah, were ahead of their time: without surviving close scholarly analyses, they anticipated later studies such as those of Frances Yates. He also interpreted in light of Philosophical Poetry the Prophetic Books of William Blake and discussed Blake's relationship to Milton and Celtic antiquarians. At the outbreak of World War I, he was a reader in French at Glasgow University in Scotland. After receiving a doctorate of the University of Bordeaux, and a lauréat des concours d'agrégation in 1919, he became associated with the Department of French at King's College London from 1920, where he was a professor from 1926. He was also director for many years of the French Institute of London (Institut Français)