Donald Sidney-Fryer Add a review

Donald Sidney-Fryer (September 8, 1934 – May 2, 2026) was an American poet, critic, literary historian, ballet historian and performer. Edmund Spenser and Clark Ashton Smith were his “two poetic mentors.” Sidney-Fryer saw his poetry as part of a "Modern Romanticism" tradition along with Ashton Smith, Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, 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." Sidney-Fryer was a pioneering literary historian and critic focusing on California literature and writers. He was called "the pre-eminent scholar of [Clark Ashton Smith]’s work”, who “... 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.” His five-volume history of Romantic Ballet and the career of ballet composer Cesare Pugni, The Case of the Light Fantastic Toe, was 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."