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 was in 1946 a co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. His autobiography The Crest on the Silver was published in 1950. At various times, Grigson was involved in teaching, journalism and broadcasting. Fiercely combative, he made many literary enemies.

Life and work

Grigson was born at the vicarage in Pelynt, a village near Looe in Cornwall, England. 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. He first came to prominence in the 1930s as a poet, then as editor from 1933 to 1939 of the poetry magazine New Verse. 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. 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".

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.

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. 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. 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, 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. 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.

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 Romantic 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 post-war riots and Industrial Revolution) of Nature's abundance, in an idyllic Kentish 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. In 1984, Grigson was interviewed by Hermione Lee in an edition of Channel 4's Book Four.

Grigson in his later life lived partly in Wiltshire, south-west England, and partly in a cave house in Troo, a troglodyte 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.

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 rates of mortality suffered by any British family during the conflicts of the 20th century. Grigson's surviving brother, Wilfrid Grigson, was killed in an air crash in 1948 while serving as a post-Partition official in Pakistan.

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. 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 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", and, in doing so, "acknowledges how every landscape drawing is a construct of the mind and imagination of its creator".

Works

References

Further reading

  • 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.)
  • Geoffrey Grigson page at Faber.
  • "Geoffrey Grigson – alumnus of St Edmund Hall, Oxford".
  • 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.
  • "Geoffrey Grigson – Poet, writer, critic, broadcaster, 1905–1985" at colander.org
  • I. Woncewas, "A Centenary Reconsideration: Thinking About Geoffrey Grigson". Parameter Magazine.
  • "Correspondence. William Empson and Geoffrey Grigson on climbers, criticism, and the morality of rudeness", Poetry Foundation.
  • "Geoffrey Grigson" at My Poetic Side.