Peter Redgrove

Peter Redgrove (born Jan. 2, 1932, Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, Eng.—died June 16, 2003, Falmouth, Cornwall) was an English poet, novelist, and playwright, known for his exuberant depictions of the natural world and a penchant for verbal pyrotechnics.

Redgrove studied natural science at Queens’ College Cambridge and went on to become a scientific journalist in the late 1950s, an experience that would, decades later, inspire The Laborators (1993). But by 1959, when he published his first book of poems, he had begun to lose interest in that pursuit, preferring to explore scientific data through the medium of poetry, in the spirit of the 18th-century physician and poet Erasmus Darwin. While at Cambridge, Redgrove had developed an obsession with the alliterative verse of medieval poets such as William Langland. He had also been a founding member of Delta, a literary magazine. During this period Redgrove had come into contact with Ted Hughes, Edward Lucie-Smith, George Mann MacBeth, and Peter Porter, all attendees of meetings of the Group, an informal writers’ workshop organized by Philip Hobsbaum. Although later in life Redgrove was to feel unjustly overshadowed by Hughes’s popularity, both poets sent each other their most recent publications. The exchange was carried on principally by Redgrove, who was an exceptionally prolific and fervent seeker of advice and encouragement from his student days through his later years.

Troubled by emotional disorder in his youth, Redgrove was mistakenly treated for schizophrenia, a traumatic misdiagnosis that fueled such poems as “Lazarus and the Sea” (in The Collector, and Other Poems [1959]). His early poetry concentrates simultaneously on existential anxiety as a source of conflict and on language’s ability to transform negativity into aesthetic experience.

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Redgrove came fully into his own in his fourth volume of poems, The Force, and Other Poems (1966), as well as in Dr. Faust’s Sea-Spiral Spirit, and Other Poems (1972). These books underscore his fascination with the effects of alcohol in particular, but water, menstrual blood, and mud all receive ecstatic treatment. One of Redgrove’s most memorable poems in these volumes is “The Idea of Entropy at Maenporth Beach” (1972): it describes a mud bath that reveals the poet’s interest in Jungian psychology and taboo subjects.

In later life Redgrove suffered from Parkinson disease and other physical ailments. In his poems, however, he kept up a defiant spirit that never flagged; on the rare occasions that his poetry mentions his medical condition, it is presented in transformative terms, in a determined and imaginative effort to rage against the dying of the light.