Background and Setting: - SS1 Literature Lesson Note

Lerrie Peters was a Trinidadian poet known for his keen exploration of personal and existential themes. While the specific biographical details of the poet are limited, his work often reflects a deep introspective engagement with the human experience. "The Panic of Growing Older" does not provide a specific setting; instead, it explores the inner landscape of the human psyche as it confronts the reality of aging.

About the Poet

Lenrie Leopold Wilfred Peters (1 September 1932 – 28 May 2009) was a Gambian surgeon, novelist, poet and educationist.
Peters was born in 1931 in Bathurst (now Banjul) in The Gambia. His parents were Lenrie Ernest Ingram Peters and Kezia Rosemary. Lenrie Sr. was a Sierra Leone Creole of West Indian or black American origin. Kezia Rosemary was a Gambian Creole of Sierra Leonean Creole origin. Lenrie Jr. grew up in Bathurst and moved to Sierra Leone in 1949, where he was educated at the Prince of Wales School, Freetown, gaining his Higher School Certificate in science subjects.

In 1952 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read Natural Sciences, graduating with a B.Sc. degree in 1956; from 1956 to 1959 he worked and studied at University College Hospital, London, and 1959 was awarded a Medical and Surgery diploma from Cambridge. Peters worked for the BBC from 1955 to 1968, on their Africa programmes.

While at Cambridge University he was elected president of the African Students’ Union, and interested himself in Pan-Africanist politics. He also began writing poetry and plays, as well as starting work on his only novel, “The Second Round” (published by Heinemann in 1965). Peters worked in hospitals in Guildford and Northampton before returning to the Gambia, where he had a surgical practice in Banjul. He was a fellow of the West African College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons in England. He published his collection of poems titled Satellites in 1967. Though renowned for his poems, he has a novel to his credit titled “The Second Round”. In The Panic of Growing Older, the poet brought to bear his medical background as he described the physiological and psychological process of aging.
Peters was President of the Historic Commission of Monuments of the Gambia, was president of the board of directors of the National Library of the Gambia and The Gambia College from 1979 to 1987, and was a member and President of the West African Examination Council (WAEC) from 1985 to 1991. He died in Dakar, Senegal, in 2009, aged 76. With these hard work and achievement, one can describe the Poet in simple phrase as a multi talented individual.