E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Peter Daniels reviews Complete Poetry, Translations and Selected Prose by Bernard Spencer (ed. Peter Robinson ) The first thought on encountering neglected poets is why the neglect – were they overshadowed, in the wrong place at the wrong time, misunderstood, good but middling, lacking a reason to get noticed? Bernard Spencer did get noticed in his time, especially by Geoffrey Grigson in his New Verse magazine, and the 1939 anthology from it where Spencer was nearly as well-represented as MacNeice and Auden . He was definitely part of the poetry scene, although he was out of Britain most of the time: in the 1940s so inevitably were many others, and in Egypt he participated in the significant British literary expatriate community ( Keith Douglas, Lawrence Durrell, Olivia Manning ). Egypt as a place was less influential upon Spencer than Greece and Spain. He put his enthusiasm for Greece to good use with translations of Seferis (collaborating with Durrell and others), and ...

Oddly, The Guardian has just today run the obituary of the poet and critic Derek Stanford . Sadly, he died 19 December, 2008. Stanford should be appreciated - among other things - for writing on The Ninties Poets with sympathy, and for his early (1954) study of Dylan Thomas . He is not - I don't think - a major Forties poet, but he was a part of the period, and deserves to be recalled.