Geoffrey Edward Harvey Grigson (2 March 1905 – 25 November 1985) was a British poet, writer, editor, critic, exhibition curator, anthologist and naturalist. In the 1930s he was editor of the influential magazine New Verse, and went on to produce 13 collections of his own poetry, as well as compiling numerous anthologies, among many published works on subjects including art, travel and the countryside. Grigson exhibited in the London International Surrealist Exhibition at New Burlington Galleries in 1936,[ "Geoffrey Grigson", St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.]
Life and work
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. As a boy, his love of objects 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.
Poet and editor
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.
[Caesar, Adrian (1991), "Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse", in Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class, and Ideology in the 1930s, Manchester University Press (pp. 107–121), pp. 109, 111.] He first came to prominence in the 1930s as a poet, then as editor from 1933 to 1939 of the poetry magazine
New Verse.
[ "Geoffrey Grigson", Encyclopædia Britannica.] Among important works by many influential poets — notably
Louis MacNeice,
Stephen Spender,
Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Paul Éluard and Grigson himself —
New Verse featured
concrete poetry by the sculptor Alberto Giacometti (translated by
David Gascoyne) and folk poetry from tribal villages of the Jagdalpür Tahsil district of
Bastar State,
Chhattisgarh, transcribed from the
Halbi language by Grigson's brother
Wilfrid Grigson. During this period, Grigson published some of his own poetry under the pseudonym Martin Boldero.
[ "Correspondence. William Empson and Geoffrey Grigson on climbers, criticism, and the morality of rudeness", Poetry, January and May 1937. Poetry Foundation.] An anthology of poems that appeared in the first 30 issues of
New Verse was published in hardback by Faber & Faber in 1939, and re-published in 1942; the second edition states that the first "came out on the day war was declared".
[Grigson, Geoffrey, ed. (1942). New Verse – An Anthology, London: Faber & Faber, p. 7.]
During World War II, Grigson worked in the editorial department of the BBC Monitoring Service at Wood Norton near Evesham, Worcestershire, and as a talks producer for the BBC at Bristol.[Julian Symons, "Grigson, Geoffrey Edward Harvey (1905–1985)", rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009, accessed 2 December 2013.][Matthew Bell, "The BBC bunker they don't want you to know about", The Independent, 30 October 2010.]
Art curator
In 1946, Grigson 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.
[ "History", ICA website.][Barry Miles, London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945, Atlantic Books, 2010, page 62. “London Calling” states that: “The ICA was founded in 1946 by the artist and critic Roland Penrose, the poet and art critic Herbert Read, (and) the Cornish poet and editor Geoffrey Grigson, and two sponsors: the art collector and benefactor Peter Watson... and Peter Gregory, the owner of Lund Humphries... Penrose, Grigson and Read were the ideas men”.] In 1951, Grigson curated an exhibition of drawings and watercolours drawn from the
British Council Collection, which for three decades toured worldwide to 57 art galleries and museums.
[ "British Drawings and Watercolours of the 20th Century from the Collection of the British Council", Visual Arts, British Council.] The exhibition consisted of more than 100 works, including those of
John Craxton,
Barbara Hepworth,
Augustus John,
Wyndham Lewis,
Henry Moore, Paul Nash,
Ben Nicholson, John Piper, and Graham Sutherland.
Art critic and author
Grigson 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 a variety of subjects, including the English countryside,
[Frances Spalding (2009), John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art, Oxford University Press, pp. 126–27.] botany, travel, and especially art –– with books on
Wyndham Lewis,
Henry Moore, and most notably,
Samuel Palmer.
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.[Richardson, R. C. (2015), "Cultural Mapping in 1951: The Festival of Britain Regional Guidebooks" (Abstract), Literature and History 24(2): 53–72.] 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.[Letter to The Times, 15 November 1956.] The visas were refused.
Champion and scholar of Samuel Palmer
Grigson's
Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (1947), an aptly poetic chronicle of the artist's early life influences and experiences, which contained 68 photo illustrations, introduced to a broad audience the early works of one of England's greatest
Romanticism painters. Grigson's follow-up,
Samuel Palmer's Valley of Vision (1960), included a selection of the artist's own writings and an additional 48 plates. Both books featured a number of previously unpublished paintings, drawings, and sketches. They established Grigson as the foremost authority on Palmer's revered "Shoreham Period", and helped trigger a surge of interest in Palmer's youthful, ecstatic, fantastical depictions (during a time of
Napoleonic Wars Swing Riots and Industrial Revolution) of Nature's abundance, in an idyllic
countryside.
Controversially, these books also caught the attention of famous art forger Tom Keating, who used their illustrations as models for a series of Palmer fakes that he did in the 1960s and '70s.
In the catalogue for a major retrospective held by the British Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art on the bicentenary of Palmer's birth (2005), Colin Harrison, curator at the Ashmolean Museum, in his essay on the artist's rediscovery, credited Grigson's 1947 book with effectively establishing a canon of Palmer's early work.
Final years
Grigson was the castaway featured in an edition of
Roy Plomley's
Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on 16 October 1982 (his favourite music track was "She Never Told Her Love" by Franz Joseph Haydn, his book choice was
The Oxford English Dictionary and his luxury item:
pâté de foie gras).
[ Desert Island Discs Castaway Archive, BBC Radio 4, October 1982.] In 1984, Grigson was interviewed by
Hermione Lee in an edition of Channel 4's
Book Four.
[ "Geoffrey Grigson interview, 1984", YouTube.]
Grigson in his later life lived partly in Wiltshire, south-west England, and partly in a cave house in Trôo, a cave dweller village in the Loir-et-Cher département in France, which features in his poetry. He died in 1985 in Broad Town, Wiltshire, where he is buried in the churchyard of Christ Church.[ "Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985)", The Literary Cemetery.]
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.
[Nikolaus Pevsner (1970), Cornwall, Penguin Books, p. 132.] Five of Grigson's six brothers died serving in the First
[ "Find War Dead – First World War", Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC).][ Grigson, Kenneth Walton, died 20 July 1918 aged 23. CWGC.][ Grigson, Lionel Henry Shuckforth, died 9 May 1917 aged 19. CWGC.][ Grigson, Claude Vivian, died 15 October 1918 aged 18. CWGC.] and Second World Wars,
[ "Find War Dead – Second World War", Commonwealth War Graves Commission.][ Grigson, Aubrey Herbert, died 27 April 1942 aged 41. CWGC.] among them
John Grigson.
[ Grigson, John William Boldero, died 3 July 1943 aged 50. CWGC.] This was one of the highest rates of mortality suffered by any British family during the conflicts of the 20th century.
[Archer, Jeremy, "One Family's Sacrifice – The Story of the Seven Sons of Canon and Mrs William Shuckforth Grigson", The Keep Military Museum, Dorchester, Dorset.] Grigson's surviving brother,
Wilfrid Grigson, was killed in an air crash in 1948 while serving as a post-Partition official in
Pakistan.
Geoffrey Grigson's first wife was Frances Franklin Galt
Honours and legacy
Described in 1963 by G. S. Fraser as "one of the most important figures in the history of English taste in our time",
Grigson was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for his 1971 volume of poetry
Discoveries of Bones and Stones.
[ "Past winners" , The Duff Cooper Prize.] 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.
In 2007, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester presented the exhibition Poets in the Landscape: The Romantic Spirit in British Art. The exhibition explored "the creative links between poetry, the pastoral vision and British art in the work of Romantic artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Neo-Romantic artists of the mid-20th century", with exhibits of Grigson's anthology The Poet's Eye, featuring lithographs by John Craxton, and copies of New Verse.[Simon Martin, Martin Butlin & Robert Meyrick, "Poets In The Landscape", Pallant House Gallery, 31 March to 10 June 2007.]
In 2017, the British Museum presented a major exhibition of British landscape paintings from the century following the death of J. M. W. Turner. The exhibition title was "borrowed from the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson's 1949 collection of essays Places of the Mind",[Geoffrey Grigson, Places of the Mind, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.] and, in doing so, "acknowledges how every landscape drawing is a construct of the mind and imagination of its creator".[Kim Sloan, Jessica Feather, Anna Gruetzner Robins, Sam Smiles and Frances Carey (curators), "Places of the Mind", British Museum, 23 February to 28 August 2017.]
Works
Further reading
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Barfoot, C. C., and R. M. Healey (eds), "My Rebellious and Imperfect Eye": Observing Geoffrey Grigson, DQR Studies in Literature 33. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2002. (Contains a comprehensive Geoffrey Grigson bibliography.)
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Hans Ostrom. "The Mint," in British Literary Magazines: The Modern Age, 1914–1984. Ed. Alvin Sullivan. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986, 264–267. (Grigson edited The Mint.)
External links
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Geoffrey Grigson page at Faber.
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"Geoffrey Grigson – alumnus of St Edmund Hall, Oxford".
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Julian Symons, "Grigson, Geoffrey Edward Harvey (1905–1985)", rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009, accessed 2 December 2013.
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"Geoffrey Grigson – Poet, writer, critic, broadcaster, 1905–1985" at colander.org
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I. Woncewas, "A Centenary Reconsideration: Thinking About Geoffrey Grigson". Parameter Magazine.
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"Correspondence. William Empson and Geoffrey Grigson on climbers, criticism, and the morality of rudeness", Poetry Foundation.
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"Geoffrey Grigson" at My Poetic Side.
