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“... by Christopher Caudwell, the zoo as a place where Stephen Spender thought it worth telling Geoffrey Grigson he had spent an enjoyable Saturday with a friend in 1934. Lists of this kind fill 13 chapters, crowded, fascinating, obsessive, with some important themes like spies and borders turning up in two or three different places. No subject is too ...”

“... to several other guests before lunch was over. He strikes a similar note when telling a story of Geoffrey Grigson, who held forth with characteristic trenchancy on the shortcomings of Horizon as the name for a magazine: who could ever have come up with that? ‘“Well,” I said, “as a matter of fact, I thought of Horizon.” This mollified him ...”

“... poetry – the ‘innumerable exercise books of poems’ that Thomas referred to in a letter to Geoffrey Grigson in 1933 – came from is no clearer. He began writing seriously around the age of 16, and there were, it seems, ten books of which four survived. The biography tells us nothing substantive about what made for the poems, or what we might make ...”

“... retarded the separation of English poetry from its general English audience. To a sharp eye – to Geoffrey Grigson’s, for instance – the burial of the private Day-Lewis was already in progress in the Thirties, when the avant-garde poet became also Nicholas Blake the detective novelist, and Day-Lewis the Communist joined the selection committee of the ...”

“... Audenaire’: he was a name such that a pun might be made of it. The contribution of Geoffrey Grigson, New Verse’s editor, was promisingly entitled ‘Auden as a Monster’: his prodigiousness does seem to have had something about it that could be rather shattering. The year after the New Verse special a thinly disguised Auden was the star ...”

“... Eliot (Macavity, not Prufrock) and – thanks to Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes’s Rattle Bag, and Geoffrey Grigson’s anthology Unrespectable Verse – a swarm of lesser-known poets.Among these has been Charles Causley, whose hard-bitten classic ‘Timothy Winters’ can fetch tears:Timothy Winters has bloody feetAnd he lives in a house on Suez ...”

“... about a Burgess fiction brings the comment: ‘This is what British criticism has descended to.’ Geoffrey Grigson’s dislike of his ‘coarse and unattractive personality’ is mentioned, repeated, finally repaid by a feeble satirical sonnet. A look at Grigson on Alvarez would have shown him how it should be ...”

“... Palmer has generally been well served by his modern biographers. The landmark in the field is Geoffrey Grigson’s Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (1947), still highly readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book ...”

“... to what is certainly a chilling and gossipy account of Auden’s personal habits, she quotes Geoffrey Grigson’s ‘beautiful tribute’ to Auden’s ‘great poetry’ in which we find ‘explicit recipes for being human’. Grigson might seem an odd model for benevolence, but it is appropriate that Hardwick’s ...”