John Heath-Stubbs; Telegraph obit (Poet)
Hyfler/Rosner
Last Updated: 12:54am GMT 27/12/2006 Telegraph
John Heath-Stubbs, who died yesterday aged 88, was one
of the most interesting poets and men of letters of the
latter half of the 20th century.
His work was an important link between the state of
English letters before Modernism and the post-modern era,
since he wrote as if no conflict existed, yet with an ear
perfectly attuned to the new sounds and to idioms of the
1940s. Heath-Stubbs's charm was great but it was mixed with
a certain mordancy. He appeared to later poets as immovable
as a cliff, partly because of a quarrel of generations.
Philip Larkin, who was his junior at Oxford and in some of
his earliest published verse was not above copying an
attractive stanza form from Heath-Stubbs, resented his
dominance of Oxford poetry, and his own exclusion from the
Eight Oxford Poets of 1942.
In 1967 Larkin dismissed Robert Lowell as "no more
than a Yank version of John Heath-Stubbs". But if there is
really an old-fashioned, London Mercury aspect of John
Heath-Stubbs as a poet, it is partly because he was so
skilled in all forms and techniques of verse, and partly
perhaps because he so profoundly admired Charles Williams,
about whom he wrote an excellent book in 1955.
John Francis Alexander Heath-Stubbs was born on July 9
1918, and was nearly blind from boyhood. He was educated at
Bembridge in the Isle of Wight, at the Worcester College for
the Blind, and privately, before going up to Queen's
College, Oxford. He so overcame his disability that he was
already as a young man a polymath, an expert on the Golden
Bough and the most learned English poet of his time.
He had a special alliance and friendship with the deaf
poet David Wright, with whom he edited a number of books,
including the 1953 Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse.
His first public appearance as a poet was in co-editing the
Oxford Poets with Michael Myer, who picked the quarrel with
Larkin. His other undergraduate contemporaries included
Sydney Keyes, who was killed fighting in 1943, and Alan
Ross, whose first collection Summer Thunder came out about
the same time as Heath-Stubbs's Wounded Thammuz. Among those
who admired its appearance in 1942 was John Wain, who read
it with awe, and was encouraged by it to believe modern
English poetry was still possible. The two became close and
lifelong friends.
Heath-Stubbs was then a tall, gangly youth with
extreme short sight, peering into books. Friends found the
sight of him in summer, holding on to the riverbank while
his punt moved slowly but surely downstream, transforming
him from an arch into a splash, unforgettably funny. Little
by little he became completely blind, so that if he was
reciting his poems to an audience he might by misjudgment
turn and address them to the wall; a friendly touch on the
elbow was something he perfectly understood and accepted. He
was an extremely accomplished reader, and disapproved of
actors, rather than poets, reading verse.
He was relaxed about his homosexuality and seemed to
live with it quite happily. In his earlier years, when he
was perhaps lonelier, visitors to his basement flat might
find a gentle, occasional snow of blackened baked beans
dropping from the ceiling. John would remark on them as on a
curiosity of nature, not connecting them with the fact that
the beans, cooked in their unpunctured tin, had exploded 10
days ago. As time went on, he was supported by more or less
low-life friends whom he in turn supported.
His public career was never orthodox. A famous poem
declared that he came "of a gentleman's family out of
Staffordshire", though later he hated that poem and tried to
stop it from being an anthology piece. He carried out
academic research into the obscure, extreme romantic poet
George Darley, taught at the Hall School, Hampstead
(1944-45), and worked for a year as an editor for
Hutchinsons.
His books were numerous. Swarming of the Bees and A
Charm Against the Toothache (1954) are memorable: the latter
had his satirical and lyrical powers in a lovely balance.
Later titles revealed a dark streak, with The Blue Fly in
His Head (1962) and Buzz Buzz (1981). The Selected Poems
were published in 1965 (a new edition appeared in 1990), and
his master work Arctorius won the Queen's Gold Medal for
Poetry in 1973. He held various academic posts: for 10 years
at the College of St Mark and St John, Chelsea; from 1952 to
1955 on a fellowship at Leeds; a post in Alexandria during
the Suez crisis, and a year in Michigan in 1960-61.
His main purpose was always poetry, however, and his
nature was already apparent in Wounded Thammuz, a thin,
orange-coloured pamphlet produced by Routledge.
Heath-Stubbs's finest work was like the best of the Greek
poets, a blend of epic, lyric and satiric, which delighted
or appalled, according to taste. His diction in his earliest
verse was conservative in a way scarcely noticed then, but
his lyricism was always modern.
Arctorius was probably the best attempt to write epic
verse in modern English, at least since Tennyson. It was by
no means a young man's poem yet it does hark back in its
variety to the promise of Wounded Thammuz. The difficulty
remains that at its most seductive it does not quite attain
the granitic quality of greatness which so largely eluded
Tennyson himself. Wounded Thammuz did not aspire to that and
so seems to succeed better, like early Milton. The best
passages in Arctorius, which are surely great poetry, are
those chosen by John Wain for The Everyman Book of English
Verse, but the entire extraordinary volume never quite falls
into pastiche.
George Barker thought it was like a stone of
Stonehenge gifted with the faculty of joking. David Wright
thought it a poem of ideas executed with marvellous zest and
energy. John Heath-Stubbs in later poems, for example in
those of The Immolation of Aleph (1985), extended his poetry
further into the classic consciousness of the Mediterranean,
which perhaps no one in our times has better stated.
His output, and growing recognition of his status, did
not falter with age. In 1989 Heath-Stubbs was appointed OBE,
a little over 30 years after becoming FRSL, and in the same
year he won the Howard Sergeant award, the Cholmondley
award, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. He was in the
1990s quite blind, but more and more widely acknowledged to
be a remarkable and even a great poet. He had collected
demotic Arab laments, translated Hafiz from Persian,
Leopardi from Italian and Anyte from Greek. They were all
brilliantly chosen and wonderfully well done: few other
poets in the last century translated poetry so coolly or so
well into English from such a variety of sources.
As an anthologist in Poems of Science (1984), he was
almost equally remarkable, as he was with David Wright in
Forsaken Garden (1950). His contribution to the special
issue on "myth" of the summer 1997 Agenda was an important
statement implacably opposed to Larkin's views.
Poetry, said Heath-Stubbs, exhibits the irrational
features of language and the mind expresses itself by
analogies. The myth, a sacred story, is not something
constructed but given. This view, deriving from Charles
Williams and beyond, rose as criticism of Larkin's
declaration: "the Myth-kitty is empty". Heath-Stubbs showed
himself conscious of who he thought his enemy was in the
vigour with which he fought his corner. In his Agenda
statement he was concise and polite, but thought the
question "absolutely crucial to poetry, any statement that
myth is no longer relevant is too crass to merit serious
discussion".
Twenty years and more after this vehement eruption of
principle he still seemed a figure from tragedy, an Old
Testament prophet, stubborn and unbending - no doubt because
he was a blind man and would trust only what he clearly saw.
His later collections included Chimeras (1994), Galileo's
Salad (1996), The Torriano Sequences (1997) and The Sound of
Light (1999); his Literary Essays (edited by Trevor Tolley,
1998) were published to mark his 80th birthday, as was a
special edition of the magazine Aquarius. He had been
President of the Poetry Society since 1993. His Collected
Poems appeared in 1988 and his autobiography, Hindsights, in
1993.
John Heath-Stubbs lived most of his life in a quiet
block of flats in Artesian Road, west London. He was skilful
and discerning in the voices of birds, and many of his later
poems were about them. His hobby, he said with some
satisfaction, was taxonomy.