Edward Lucie-Smith is a poet, translator, and art critic, and the editor of several important anthologies, including the comprehensive Penguin anthology British Poetry Since 1945 (1970). He was a central figure in British poetry in the 1960s, first as chairman of the Group, and then as the champion of the English avant-garde. Since then he has concentrated on art criticism, and diversified into biography, fiction, and autobiography. A number of the poems in his most-recent collection, The Well-Wishers (1974), were addressed to artists and many of his poems since then have been written in collaborations with artists. In 1985 he brought out a revised edition of British Poetry Since 1945, accurately reflecting the changes of direction in British poetry since 1970.

John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, of an old West Indian family. His father, John Dudley Lucie-Smith, was a civil servant whose ancestors had left England as part of the...