Geoffrey Grigson

Life

Grigson was born at the vicarage in Pelynt, a village near Looe in Cornwall. His childhood in rural Cornwall had a significant influence on his poetry and writing in later life. As a boy, his love of things of nature (plants, bones and stones) was sparked at the house of family friends at Polperro who were painters and amateur naturalists. He was educated at St John's School, Leatherhead, and at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

After graduating from Oxford University, Grigson took a job at the London office of the Yorkshire Post, from where he moved on to become literary editor of the Morning Post. He first came to prominence in the 1930s as a poet, then as editor from 1933 to 1939 of the influential poetry magazine New Verse. During this period, he published his own poetry under the pseudonym Martin Boldero.

During World War II he worked in the editorial department of the BBC Monitoring Service at Wood Norton near Evesham, Worcestershire and at Bristol. In 1946 he was one of the founders of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, together with Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, Peter Watson and Peter Gregory. In 1951 Grigson curated a touring exhibition of drawings and watercolours drawn from the British Council Collection.

Later in life he was a noted critic, reviewer (for the New York Review of Books in particular), and compiler of numerous poetry anthologies. He published 13 collections of poetry, and wrote on travel, on art (notably works on Samuel Palmer, Wyndham Lewis and Henry Moore; he also had a volatile friendship with the painter John Piper), on the English countryside, and on botany, among other subjects. In 1951, he was General Editor of the 13-volume About Britain series of regional guidebooks published by William Collins to coincide with the Festival of Britain. After the repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, at the initiative of Stephen Spender, Grigson joined a group of British writers and artists, who applied for visas to visit dissidents in Hungary. The visas were refused.

Grigson was the castaway featured in an edition of Roy Plomley's Desert Island Discs first broadcast on 16 October 1982. Although he described himself as "a musical ignoramus", his musical choices included works by Joseph Haydn, Benjamin Britten, Henry Purcell, Georges Bizet and Giuseppe Verdi. His luxury item was Pâté de foie gras.

In 1984, he was interviewed by Hermione Lee in an edition of Channel 4's Book Four.

Grigson in his later life lived partly in Wiltshire, England, and partly in Trôo, a village in the Loir-et-Cher département in France, which features in his poetry. He died in 1985 in Broad Town, Wiltshire, and is buried there in Christ Church Churchyard.

Family

Born in 1905, Grigson was the youngest of seven sons of Canon William Shuckforth Grigson (1845–1930), a Norfolk clergyman who had settled in Cornwall as vicar of Pelynt, and Mary Beatrice Boldero, herself the daughter of a clergyman. The inscription on his father's slate headstone in Pelynt Churchyard is the work of Eric Gill, 1931. Five of Grigson's six brothers died serving in the first and second world wars, among them John Grigson. This was one of the highest prices paid by any British family during the conflicts of the 20th century. Grigson's one surviving brother Wilfrid Grigson died in an air accident in 1948, while serving as Commissioner for Refugees in Pakistan.

Geoffrey Grigson's first wife was Frances Franklin Galt (who died in 1937 of tuberculosis). With her, he founded the poetry magazine New Verse. They had one daughter, Caroline (who was married to Colin Banks). Grigson's second marriage was to Berta Emma Kunert, who bore him two children, Anna and Lionel Grigson. Following their divorce, Grigson married Jane Grigson, née McIntire (1928–90). Their daughter is Sophie Grigson.

Honours and legacy

Grigson was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for his 1971 volume of poetry Discoveries of Bones and Stones.

A collection of tributes entitled Grigson at Eighty, compiled by R. M. Healey (Cambridge: Rampant Lions Press), was published in 1985, the year of his death.

In 2005, to mark the centenary of Grigson's birth a conference was held at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

New Verse: An Anthology (1942 edition)

Compiled by Grigson. Poets included were:

C. Day-Lewis – Bernard Spencer – Philip O'Connor – Louis MacNeice – George Barker – Kathleen Raine – Frederic Prokosch – A. J. Young – Archibald MacLeish – Norman Cameron – Stephen Spender – Geoffrey Taylor – Dylan Thomas – A. J. M. Smith – W. H. Auden – Pablo Neruda – Geoffrey Grigson – Hugh Chisholm – Kenneth Allott – Alberto Giacometti – Paul Éluard – Bernard Gutteridge – Ruthven Todd – Gavin Ewart – Charles Madge

Poetry of the Present (1949)

Drummond Allison – Kenneth Allott – W. H. Auden – George Barker – John Bayliss – John Betjeman – Norman Cameron – Cecil Day-Lewis – William Empson – G. S. Fraser – Christopher Fry – David Gascoyne – Geoffrey Grigson – John Hewitt – Esmé Hooton – Glyn Jones – Sidney Keyes – James Kirkup – Laurie Lee – Louis MacNeice – Charles Madge – Hubert Nicholson – Norman Nicholson – Clere Parsons – Kathleen Raine – W. R. Rodgers – E. J. Scovell – John Short – Bernard Spencer – Stephen Spender – Derek Stanford – Dylan Thomas – Evan Thomas – Ruthven Todd – Rex Warner – Vernon Watkins