Peter G. Whigham; Poet and Professor

Peter George Whigham, a poet, translator and teacher who helped popularize such authors as Ezra Pound, George Santayana and William Carlos Williams, has died of injuries he suffered in a traffic crash. He was 62.

Whigham, a former lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and comparative literature professor at UC Berkeley, had retired to Hayward. He died Aug. 6 after the accident in Humboldt County, it was learned this week.

A native of Oxford, England, Whigham came to the United States in 1965 after working as an actor, broadcaster and free-lance writer for the British Broadcasting Corp.

At BBC, he coordinated the first features focusing on Pound, Santayana and Williams.

His books included: “Ezra Pound” (1955); “Clear Lake Comes From Enjoyment” (1958); “The Marriage Rite” (1959) and “The Ingathering of Love” (1967).

Other books included “The Blue Winged Bee: Love Poems of the VI Dalai Lama and the Ingathering of Love” (1969); “The Crystal Mountain” (1970) and “The Poems of Meleager” (1976).

In 1969 he produced what was called an “affectionate but objective” translation of “The Poems of Catullus,” a contemporary of Julius Caesar’s.

“The Blue Winged Bee” was honored by the Poetry Book Society in 1969.

Whigham’s poetry appeared in numerous anthologies, including “23 Modern Poets,” “Penguin Book of Love Poems” and “Twenty Times in One Place.”