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Selected Poems

This selection of an abundant poet restores him to a new readership with the work on which his popularity was based. His ground-breaking early poetry is given its due, especially the major long poem Wounded Thammuz, printed here in its entirety. Heath-Stubbs was at the centre of the New Romantic school. The Second World War left him as almost the sole representative of one stream of English poetry. He remains crucial to the 1940s and ’50s, and was a popular presence into the 1980s, composing his later poems in his head and reciting from memory. Too long he has been sidelined by shifts of critical fashion.

John Heath-Stubbs was born in 1918. He was educated at The Queen’s College, Oxford, where his contemporaries were C. S....