William Paton Ker

William Paton Ker, FBA (usually referred to as W. P. Ker; 30 August 1855 – 17 July 1923) was a Scottish literary scholar and essayist.

He was born in Glasgow in 1855. He studied at Glasgow Academy, the University of Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford.

He was appointed to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford in 1879. He became Professor of English Literature and History at the University College of South Wales, Cardiff in 1883; and moved to University College London as Quain Professor in 1889. He was the Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1920 to his death whilst hill-climbing in Europe. A W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture is held at Glasgow University in his honour.

He is referred to repeatedly in J. R. R. Tolkien's essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. W. H. Auden's discovery of Ker was a turning point:

"... what good angel lured me into Blackwell's one afternoon and, from such a wilderness of volumes, picked out for me the essays of W. P. Ker? No other critic whom I have subsequently read could have granted me the same vision of a kind of literary All Souls Night in which the dead, the living and the unborn writers of every age and tongue were seen as engaged upon a common, noble and civilizing task. No other could have so instantaneously aroused in me a fascination with prosody, which I have never lost."

• Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (1897; second edition 1908)
• The Dark Ages (1904)
• Sturla the Historian (1906)
• Tennyson (1909)
• English Literature; Medieval (1912) – also known as Medieval English literature
• Two Essays (1918)
• Sir Walter Scott (1919)
• The Art of Poetry (1923)
• Form And Style In Poetry (1928)
• On Modern Literature (1955)
• Collected Essays (1968) edited by Charles Whibley