Donald Sidney-Fryer

Donald Sidney-Fryer (born September 8, 1934) is an American poet, critic, literary historian, ballet historian, and performer. Edmund Spenser and Clark Ashton Smith are his “two poetic mentors.” Sidney-Fryer sees his poetry as part of a "Modern Romanticism" tradition along with Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, Nora May French, Clark Ashton Smith, and other poets he calls the “California Romantics”. Poet Richard L. Tierney said Sidney-Fryer's poems "make us see ... the ideals that moved us when we were less 'secure' and more human: adventure, love of life, and above all, the intricate beauty of a world long vanished—yet not vanished, if only we had eyes to see." As a literary historian and critic, Sidney-Fryer focuses on California literature and writers. He has been called "the pre-eminent scholar of [Clark Ashton Smith]’s work.” Literary historian Scott Connors elaborated: “Sidney-Fryer not only established the foundations for all future scholarship in this field, but he also wrote some of the most insightful and valuable evaluations of Smith's oeuvre ever written.” As a historian of ballet, Sidney-Fryer's major work is The Case of the Light Fantastic Toe, using the fifty-year career of ballet composer Cesare Pugni to tell the history of Romantic Ballet in five volumes, described as "deserv[ing] to be in every college music library." Sidney-Fryer also promoted poets and poetry by writing and starring in one-man shows throughout the United States and Great Britain, often appearing in an Elizabethan English costume and billing himself as "the last of the courtly poets."