Search Results

“... Geoffrey Grigson’s best poem, and the type of his best poetry, is ‘His Swans’. Evidently and justly, he thinks well enough of it to put it in the Faber Book of Reflective Verse as his sole exhibit: Remote music of his swans, their long Necks ahead of them, slow Beating of their wings, in unison, Traversing serene Grey wide blended horizontals Of endless sea and sky ...”

“... Thoughtful as always about how to win friends and influence people, Geoffrey Grigson in his latest book of poems congratulates himself that his elderly eyes If they remain alert Do the more easily recognise Squirming in his primal dirt Another verse-reviewing squirt. Well, it is nice to know where we stand, and after that rousing salute the most scrupulous reviewer need not be afraid of disturbing cultural harmony or bruising the petals of a sensitive plant ...”

“... straight or that one has the necessary stamina to keep the job, but it is a prerequisite.’) Geoffrey Grigson, so much older than Gunn (he is 77), has of course built his career about being considered impertinent, so it’s not surprising to find in his latest collection (his first was in 1939) runovers like these: So mud was on you that day. So it ...”

“... Geoffrey Grigson and I were touring Wiltshire in a hired car, a black Morris 1000 saloon, doing a piece of photo-journalism for Picture Post. I was taking the photographs. It-was 1951. The Mail had offered a reward of £10,000 for any information leading to the capture of the fleeing diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean ...”

“... That it is a feat to be without spite is coincidentally manifested by the appearance of Geoffrey Grigson’s Recollections. Grigson’s jacket proffers, as a representative gnome: ‘I never heard T.S. Eliot laugh.’ Back in the book this stands on its lordly own in a section of ‘Items’. Some have never ...”

“... therefore, his Penguin Book of Light Verse is less wholly pleasurable, even less admirable, than Geoffrey Grigson’s now nearly ten-years-old but newly reprinted Unrespectable Verse, then part of the reason may be (given that the two volumes share a number of poems) that Grigson has had either the wisdom or the good ...”

“... of literary skill’. (Once celebrated as the Shelley of the Thirties, he was later described by Geoffrey Grigson as the ‘Rupert Brooke of the Depression’.) Isherwood, he grudgingly conceded, could claim ‘accomplishment’. Isherwood returned the tepid compliment, 12 years later, with a script for the Tony Richardson production of The Loved ...”

“... Orators when it appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene ...”

“... gives inadequate or otiose adjectives to many of the people mentioned, ‘irascible’ Leavis and Grigson, ‘astringent’ Connolly, ‘aggressive’ Lewis, ‘perennially acerbic’ Douglas Cooper, ‘self-righteous’ Rayner Heppenstall, and so on. It was the need to make a living that pushed Read’s interests towards visual art. In 1919 he married Evelyn ...”

“... true, but each supreme in his own sphere of respected judgment – F.R. Leavis on Mount Scrutiny, Geoffrey Grigson on Mount New Verse. From that time until today, the poets (all excepting Auden in his Heaven) have been in the position of soldiers wandering across a plain between fortresses, liable to be shot down in the cross-fire. In the Leavis/...”

“... You wouldn’t guess it from Mr Grigson’s anthology, but satire was once a deadly activity. It literally killed, or was believed to, which sometimes had the same result. Robert Elliott’s classic study of The Power of Satire tells us that poems were used as weapons of war in pre-Islamic Arabia, and it is not only there, or in the curses of primitive tribesmen remote from our literary tradition, that this ‘power’ showed itself ...”

“... the sense we get from his last poems of lost time and irremediable error. There is an essay by Geoffrey Grigson on MacNeice, in which this is said: ‘He could be embarrassingly silent. A conversation came to a halt. Who was going to break the silence and bridge the silent interruption? His lack of usual reticence, too, could be sudden, startling and ...”

“... kind of thing. And yet, somehow, poor MacCarthy: first Leavis and then, shortly afterwards, Geoffrey Grigson, who reserved a large cage for him in New Verse’s private zoo. (Roy Campbell’s notorious assault on Grigson was in fact prompted by something Grigson said about ...”

“... byways of Old England was disgraceful: he wrote him off vituperously. Piper, however, had allies, Geoffrey Grigson for one (though, characteristically, not for long) and Betjeman, through whom relations were established with the Architectural Review and with whom he became chief scout, as it were, of the Shell Guides. Betjeman’s Cornwall first ...”

“... a friend. Betjeman carefully arranged a claque of reviewers. He did not care for criticism: when Geoffrey Grigson at New Verse turned down his poem about the arrest of Oscar Wilde he stood on the backside of the White Horse at Uffington and cursed him. In these years he must, despite all the appearances, have been working extremely hard. His output ...”