When the poetry of Jeremy Prynne began to appear in England during the 1960s, it secured for itself a reputation and influence among independent and avant-garde poets that was not matched by its reception in the established centers of literary decision-making, the London weeklies and academic reviews. To the literary establishment Prynne's poetry seemed willfully hermetic, bound by an aesthetic formalism derived from the obscure reveries of Charles Olson and the American projectivists. On the other hand, for those who were attempting to establish in England, for the first time since the modernists, a coherent and enduring practice of poetry, Prynne's writing was and remains exemplary in its procedures and address. But the publication of Poems in 1982, essentially the collected works, may mark the beginning of a wider recognition of the texts.

Jeremy Halvard Prynne was born on 24 June 1936. After an education in the English primary and secondary...