Robin Skelton was born in Easington, East Yorkshire, the only son of the village schoolmaster, Cyril Skelton, and his wife, Eliza Robins Skelton. His childhood was a lonely one; his father's position contributed to his having few friends, and in response he turned inward. As he says in The Poet's Calling (1975)--one of five books he has written about poetry as craft and way of life--"My dependence upon my own thoughts and dreams for my entertainment and comfort was increased by the bullying of the other boys at the village school." The isolation continued at Pocklington Grammar School near York, where he boarded from 1936 to 1943 and "spent much time alone reading or, on Sundays, wandering the countryside and the fields around the school." Skelton believes it was this "habit of solitude" that first set him "to feeling a compulsion to write poetry."

His first published poems appeared...