Olga Katzin Miller (9 July, 1896 – 6 January, 1987) was a British satirical poet who published under the name Sagittarius. She was closely associated with the New Statesman for several decades in the mid-twentieth century.

Under her birth name, Olga Katzin published a collection of poems—in 1927 in Britain and 1928 in the United States—satirizing major English poets, titled Peeps at Parnassus and illustrated by Arthur Watts.[1] In a review in Poetry Magazine, Alexander Laing declared that it illustrated "that satire and wit" of such a precise British versifier "are on a distinct and higher plane" from typical American comic and parodic verse.[2]

Miller began publishing with the New Statesman in the late 1930s, and published several books of her poems, including Sagittarius Rhyming in 1940, Targets in 1943, and Quiver's Choice in 1945.[3][4][5] The "Acknowledgments" in Quiver's Choice note that, in addition to the Sagittarius poems, it also contains verses published under the names "Fiddlestick" and "Roger Service." She was more widely read and discussed in the postwar period, when, as David Kynaston observes, she spoke for a certain British attitude bitterly resigned to Britain's subservience to American interests.[6] Two of her poems on this theme were republished in the United States by Time in 1944 and 1948.[7][8] Her poems often wittily made use of the forms and themes of Elizabethan poetry, including a parody Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" titled "The Passionate Profiteer to His Love."[9] In this sense, she was part of a larger revival, in the early reign of Elizabeth II, of the then-queen's namesake Elizabeth I, exemplified by works such as Benjamin Britten's opera Gloriana.[10]

Born into a Jewish family in London, Olga Katzin married Hugh Miller, a well-known stage actor, in 1921; they had three children.[11][12]

References

  1. ↑ Katzin, Olga (1928). Peeps at Parnassus. New York: Coward-McCann. OCLC 1834058.
  2. ↑ Laing, Alexander (1929). "Satire of Quality". Poetry. 34 (3): 175–176. ISSN 0032-2032.
  3. ↑ Sagittarius (1940). Sagittarius Rhyming. London: J. Cape. OCLC 1388552.
  4. ↑ Sagittarius (1943). Target. London: J. Cape. OCLC 4881378.
  5. ↑ Sagittarius (1945). Quiver's Choice. London: J. Cape. OCLC 2040055.
  6. ↑ Kynaston, David (2010). Family Britain, 1951-1957. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9780802719645.
  7. ↑ Sagittarius (25 September 1944). "Foreign Relations: Pregnant Poem". Time.
  8. ↑ Sagittarius (2 February 1948). "Foreign News: A Very Respectable History". Time.
  9. ↑ Cederwell, William (2017). Reading London in Wartime : Blitz, the People and Propaganda in 1940s Literature (1st ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 9781351239042.
  10. ↑ Smith, Matthew Wilson; Begam, Richard, eds. (2016). Modernism and opera. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 290–314. ISBN 9781421420639.
  11. ↑ "Hugh Miller, actor". Friends of Berwick and District Museum and Archives.
  12. ↑ "Gabriel L. Miller's Obituary (2017) Wicked Local Cape Cod". Wicked Local Cape Cod. Legacy.com. March 4, 2017.
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