The spoilers

(Cape Town, S.A. 'Electric' Printing and Publishing Company, 1901). SABIB, third entry under this title. Original cloth unevenly sunned, pp. (vii) + 91, portrait. Binding slightly slack, light foxing, light water-stain in the tail margin. Inscribed on the front pastedown by the poet. Kett emigrated to South Africa in 1882 to join the teaching staff at St. Andrew's College in Grahamstown. The earliest known collections of his verse are Battle songs for British soldiers and The risen Christ: a vision of the great forty days and other poems, which (like most of his volumes) were privately printed for him in Cape Town in 1899. His epic, The spoilers, an allegorical representation of the influence of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil on man's soul, drew lavish praise from such local papers as Grocott's Penny Mail, South African Review, The Cape Argus, and Cape Times, and had an initial printing of 1 000 copies in 1900. This was followed by The millenium vision (c. 1902). With The divine tragedy (1905), Kett produced a verse drama about the Last Supper and Crucifixion. Lyrics of Empire (1908) followed and then came The poetical works of George Kett published in London in 1911. On 3.11.1921 he delivered a public lecture in the Hall of the British Medical Association, Cape Town, at which he claimed to have discovered the basic principle underlying all poetical composition. His thesis, probably the first example of indigenous poetic theory in South Africa, remains a literary curiosity. Kett was a great self-advertiser and made no lasting contribution to the development of South African poetry. (Dictionary of South African biography, Volume V, pp. 406 - 7) . .