Scientist into Poet: Neil Roberts on the emergence of Peter Redgrove

Neil Roberts's essay follows Peter Redgrove from boyhood to the point where he was publishing as a poet. It opens with a child who chose a microscope over a ventriloquist's doll, then a boarding-school scientist who left with distinctions in Zoology and Chemistry and scholarships to read Natural Sciences at Cambridge. National Service came first, and the essay treats it as the turning point: a harsh experience that Redgrove later fictionalised in the novel In the Country of the Skin, published in 1973, and that Roberts calls the death of the orthodox scientist and the conception of the poet. A meeting with an art student then gave him what he later described as a call to poetry.

At Cambridge the change shows in what he bought and read. Roberts lists Eliot's collected poems and plays acquired in the summer of 1952, then the Auden and Pearson anthology that sent him to Langland, and he reads Redgrove's story of a sudden conversion in a bookshop as partly myth. Redgrove credited Eliot as the first poet to make him feel he might write poetry himself. The essay follows him into the poetry group started by Philip Hobsbaum, where poems were typed and circulated in advance, and into friendships with Harry Guest and with Kamau Brathwaite, who later named Redgrove the one original among the Cambridge poets of his time. With Rodney Banister he helped launch the magazine Delta.

The second half turns to the poems. His first published piece, 'Notturno', appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1953 and is judged an unusual juvenile effort, though it already borrows from Eliot's mermaids. Roberts gives most space to 'Lazarus and the Sea', which he reads closely for its sound patterning, its dissolving of the sea into its attributes and its Green Man imagery. He sees it as the first statement of Redgrove's lifelong religious, earthy and erotic vision.

The essay ends with Ted Hughes. Roberts argues that when the two met, near the end of Redgrove's student years, it was Redgrove who was the senior poet, a point Hughes later acknowledged in a letter. A list of sources follows, including Brathwaite's books, Philip Hobsbaum's articles on the Group and on Hughes at Cambridge, and the Redgrove papers at the University of Sheffield.

Work

Scientist into Poet: The Emergence of Peter Redgrove

Author

Neil Roberts

Poems in this selection

• Lazarus and the Sea
• Notturno

Eliot was the first poet who made me feel I might write something like poetry.

Peter Redgrove, The Wolf, issue 18

a coming together of bodily happenings and mental happenings in a way I had never known before

Peter Redgrove, The Wolf, issue 18