Geoffrey Grigson

Geoffrey Edward Harvey Grigson (2 March 1905 – 25 November 1985) was a British poet, writer, editor, critic, exhibition curator, anthologist and naturalist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 exhibited in the London International Surrealist Exhibition at New Burlington Galleries in 1936, and in 1946 co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

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.

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.

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 autobiography The Crest on the Silver was published in 1950.

At various times he was involved in teaching, journalism and broadcasting.

Fiercely combative, he made many literary enemies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 1976, along with Palmer experts from the Ashmolean, Fitzwilliam, Tate, and British Museums, Grigson helped Times reporter Geraldine Norman confirm that 13 suspect Palmers that had come on the market over the previous decade were forgeries.

At Keating's 1979 art fraud trial at the Old Bailey, in his searing testimony on the credulity of the Bond Street art merchants who bought and sold some of the fake Palmers, contentious art critic Brian Sewell referred to a personal letter in Grigson's The Visionary Years that made ridiculous a key element of the provenance they had proffered, much to the delight of Keating's defence barrister.

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.

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 a cave house in Trôo, 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.

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.