Peter Scupham is among the most distinguished poets to have emerged in England during the 1970s. Even in a period not easily categorized by literary groupings, his is a strikingly individual talent: partly because he began to write relatively late (he was never that vain and vulnerable creature, the young poet); partly because his concerns have, as we shall see, more to do with history and continuity than with the ephemeral present; and partly because his fondness for timeless formal structures owes little to contemporary fashions.

John Peter Scupham was born in Liverpool, to John and Dorothy Clark Scupham, but spent his childhood in Cambridgeshire. He was educated at The Perse School, Cambridge; at St. George's, Harpenden; and, after national service, at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he read English, graduating with honors in 1957. His father was an educationist who became controller of BBC Educational Broadcasting; this background may...