Malcolm Guite

Ayodeji Malcolm Guite (born 12 November 1957) is an English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest, and academic.

Born in Nigeria to British expatriate parents, Guite earned degrees from Cambridge and Durham universities.

His research interests include the intersection of religion and the arts, and the examination of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield, and British poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

He was a Bye-Fellow and chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge, and associate chaplain of St Edward King and Martyr, Cambridge.

On several occasions, he has taught as visiting faculty at several colleges and universities in England and North America.

Guite is the author of five books of poetry, including two chapbooks and three full-length collections, as well as several books on Christian faith and theology.

Guite has a decisively simple, formalist style in poems, many of which are sonnets, and he stated that his aim is to "be profound without ceasing to be beautiful".

Guite performs as a singer and guitarist fronting the Cambridgeshire-based blues, rhythm and blues, and rock band Mystery Train.

Guite was born on 12 November 1957 in Ibadan, Oyo State, in Nigeria.

At birth, he was given the first name Ayodeji which is a Yoruba tribal name meaning "the second joy".

According to Guite, the name was suggested to his mother by the Yoruba nurse who attended to her through a difficult childbirth and whom Guite states probably saved both his and his mother's life.

His parents were British expatriates living in Nigeria where his father was a Methodist lay preacher who travelled around the country evangelising.

His father also taught as lecturer in Classics at the University of Ibadan.

According to Guite, after ten years in Nigeria, his father "ever the wanderer, went and got a job in Canada, where we then moved".

Although his family had settled in Canada, his parents thought he was losing his British identity and decided to enrol him in boarding school in England where he spent his teenage years.

He attended the Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Elstree, Hertfordshire.

He describes the boarding school experience as terrible, an "atmosphere of guilt, oppression and general alienation" where he strayed from his childhood Christian faith.

In its place, Guite embraced a "rational scientific materialism" coloured by B.F. Skinner's behaviourism and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett.

During these years, Guite says that he was not sure whether he belonged in England or in Canada.

In the end, however, he decided that he belonged in England after winning a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge to read English and after discovering "real ale"—something he says "they don't have properly in Canada at all".

Guite adds that after these two events he "fell in love with Cambridge, and I've never quite escaped its gravitational pull".

Guite returned gradually to his Christian faith, first under the influence of beauty in the poetry of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and visits to historical sites that had deep religious significance—Rome, Glencolmcille, and Scotland's Iona.

After delving into the works of Keats and Shelley, Guite decided to begin writing poetry.

In his final year of undergraduate study, Guite states that he had a religious experience writing a literary paper analysing the Psalms that he likened to a conversion experience.

He chose to be confirmed in the Church of England shortly after.

Guite graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts (BA)—later automatically upgraded to Master of Arts (MA (Cantab))—in English Literature in 1980.

Guite was ordained as a priest in the Church of England in 1991.

As a deacon he was first assigned to a parish on "the Oxmoor estate in Huntingdon".

He described this period as not having much time for writing sonnets, saying: "being a priest and a poet feels a very natural combination now. It didn’t at first".

He put poetry aside for seven years, "in order to concentrate on and learn deeply my priestly vocation, and life in my parishes was totally absorbing and demanding so it felt right to let the other fields lie fallow".

Guite teaches in the pastoral theology graduate programme at the Cambridge Theological Federation where he frequently advises "clergy who are returning to academia to do a dissertation to reflect on their often amazing parish experiences".

After graduating, Guite taught for several years as a secondary school teacher before deciding to seek a doctoral degree, and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from Durham University in 1993.

His doctoral dissertation focused on "the centrality of memory as a theme in the sermons and meditations of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne and to explore the extent of their influence on the treatment of memory in T.S. Eliot's poetry".

While researching the topic of his dissertation, in considering the struggles of John Donne with a similar question in the early seventeenth-century, Guite began to wonder if God was calling him too to be a priest.

From 2003 he was chaplain and Bye-Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge.

Guite also lectures regularly in the United States and Canada, including visiting positions at Duke University Divinity School and Regent College.

As an academic, Guite describes the focus of his research interests as "the interface between theology and the arts, more specifically Theology and Literature" and "special interests in Coleridge and C. S. Lewis" as well as J. R. R. Tolkien and British poets.

Since October 2014, Guite has been a visiting research fellow at St John's College, at Durham University.

Guite performs as a singer and guitarist fronting the Cambridgeshire-based blues, rhythm and blues, and rock band Mystery Train.

He has collaborated with Canadian singer-songwriter Steve Bell for several tracks on a 4-CD set by Bell called Pilgrimage that was released in 2014 by Signpost Music.