Geoffrey Grigson

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.

• Name — Geoffrey Grigson • Birth Name — Geoffrey Edward Harvey Grigson • Born — 2 March 1905 • Birthplace — Pelynt, Cornwall, England • Died — 25 November 1985 • Place of death — Broad Town, Wiltshire, England • Occupation — Poet, essayist, editor, critic, anthologist and naturalist • Pen Name — Martin Boldero • Education — St John's School; St Edmund Hall, Oxford • Children — 4, inc. Lionel Grigson; Sophie Grigson • Relatives — John Grigson (brother); Wilfrid Grigson (brother); Giacomo Benedetto (grandson) • Awards — Duff Cooper Prize

Geoffrey 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.

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. 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.

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.

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 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 Joseph Haydn, his book choice was the Oxford English Dictionary and his luxury item: foie gras). 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.

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. Geoffrey Grigson's first wife was Frances Franklin Galt (who died in 1937 of tuberculosis). With her, he founded the poetry magazine New Verse. They had one daughter, Caroline (who married designer Colin Banks). With his second wife, Berta Emma Kunert, Grigson had two children, Anna and Lionel Grigson. Following divorce from his second wife, Grigson married Jane Grigson, née McIntire (1928–90). Their daughter is Sophie Grigson. Among Grigson's grandchildren is the political scientist Giacomo Benedetto.