Maybe all poetry, in so far as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say, but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Ted Hughes.[1]

Abstract: Notes towards a reading of the poems ‘The last day of Leave (1916)’ by Robert Graves, ‘Six Yount Men’, by Ted Hughes, ‘Wounds’ by Michael Longley and ‘MCMXIV’. Each of these is concerned with an incident that occurred during the First World War, and all were written at a significant time after the end of that war. Robert Graves who fought in the war writes about, what is purported to be a personal experience. The other three poets re-tell incidents or experiences which happened to others. Citing the poet Wilfred Owen: ‘the poetry is the pity’, this essay briefly considers each poem in the light of the dignity and sympathy with which each poet deals with the people whose lives and deaths are represented in their poems.

Keywords: Northern Ireland, nationalism, unionism, commemoration, visual, photographs, The Troubles

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Foundation Myths

Many of the foundation myths through which nations view their past and try to explain their present concern war and conquest. Britain is no exception. Over the centuries, tales of martial prowess have been told to celebrate or justify British ascendancy over a rapidly growing empire; or stories of glorious defeats or military disasters have been told to explicate Britain’s decline as a world power. In particular, numerous Britons – many of whom had no direct experience of either conflict – have told and still tell themselves greatly simplified stories about the British experience of the two world wars.

The great myth of the Second World War is that in 1940 the tiny island of Britain heroically stood entirely alone against the apparently invincible might of the German War machine.[2] The British myth of the First World War is that from it was a case of ‘Lions Led by Donkeys’: tens of thousands of brave working-class Tommies died in pointless attack after attack, planned by a cabal of incompetent, arrogant aristocratic generals who remained safely miles behind the front-line.[3]

It was in the 1960s that, petrified by the very real possibility that the Cold War could lead to global annihilation and their revulsion against what they saw as the immoral actions of their own governments, many young people in the UK and USA began searching for books, music and religious practices which offered alternative ethical systems and models of personal relationships and social organisation to those of mainstream western culture, which they saw as corrupted by the same kind of selfish, intransigent thinking by a blinkered older generation that led to the carnage of the First World War.

As Joseph T. Thomas Jr. observed, many found what they were looking for in two voluminous works, both profoundly influenced by folklore but also drawing on their authors’ personal experiences of war which seemed to address their concerns: The Lord of the Rings and The White Goddess. Both books, as Thomas observed, were written by men born in the previous century and whose lives must have seemed extremely remote from those of their rapidly growing body of young readers; one a profoundly conservative emeritus professor of philology in Oxford, the other a writer best known for his popular historical fiction living on Mallorca, which was then an obscure, underpopulated Balearic Island. And both of whose lives had been irredeemably changed - one may say with some justification blighted – by their experiences in the First World War. And yet, as Thomas notes:

Their dedication to the complexity of childhood, the power of an unironic treatment of Faërie, and their profound appreciation of darkness and light within both – an appreciation heightened by their experience of war – made these unlikely septuagenarians central to youth culture.[4]

However, in the 1950s a generation of young poets, rejecting the patrician hauteur of modernism, had discovered in the poetry of Robert Graves a significant body of work that not only engaged their interest and admiration but inspired their own creativity as well. In Ireland in the late 1950s (not yet immersed in the three decade long Civil War which would become known throughout the island of Ireland, with euphemistic reticence, as ‘The Troubles’), two poets who would become major voices in Anglo-Irish poetry, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, then undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin, pored over Graves’s poems together. ‘We inhaled poetry with our Sweet Afton cigarettes’, recalled Longley. ‘From the beginning Robert Graves emerged as one of our heroes. We read his poems aloud to each other, counting the beats and scattering ash into the gully of the 1959 Collected Poems […] Graves was an ideal focus for two apprentices.’[5]

For Longley and Mahon, the attraction of The White Goddess was that it was an impressively eclectic, erudite, and profoundly Romantic account of poetic inspiration; but perhaps its principal delight was that it provided a horde of images for two young poets emerging from their juvenilia to ‘pilfer’. Graves’s prose criticism in its irreverence ‘appealed to our youthful iconoclasm’ as Longley conceded, especially the final Clark Lecture given in 1955 in Oxford, titled ‘These Be Your Gods O Israel’, in which Graves attacked the unassailable great poets of the previous generation: Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. As Nancy Rosenfeld notes, Graves adopted ‘the persona of an Old Testament prophet, posited the poets as idols and their admirers from Academe as idol worshipers, declaring that “once an idol is set up it cannot easily be removed; but slowly moulders down the years, as Byron’s and Wordsworth’s have done”’.[6]

But above all it was Graves’s poetry that inspired Longley and Mahon; what Longley summarises in his introduction to the Selected Poems as ‘the singing line, complex syntax and stanzaic pattern’ (Graves Selected, p. xiii), which Graves had absorbed from a personal canon of unfashionable English poets as diverse as his fellow Georgians and the Tudor poet John Skelton.

Not so Ted Hughes. On leaving Mexborough Grammar School in South Yorkshire, from where he won an Open Exhibition to read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, Hughes had been given a most formative leaving gift by his English master and mentor John Fisher: a copy of The White Goddess. It quickly became, and remained, as Hughes repeatedly called it ‘one of my sacred books’. Ann Skea, the distinguished critic and Hughes scholar has observed that Hughes ‘recognized that he and Graves “shared an obsession” and he acknowledged that repeated reading of Graves’s book during his three years at Cambridge University and after’.[7] It was an experience from which, as Fran Brearton quipped in a recent discussion for BBC Radio 4, ‘Hughes never recovered’.[8]

Six Young Men

Hughes was born in 1930, so fought in neither First nor Second World Wars. He did however undertake National Service. With the lowly rank of Aircraftsman second class, he was posted to an RAF Listening Station in his native Yorkshire. Hughes later described his experience of service life as consisting of nothing but ‘read and re-read Shakespeare and watch the grass grow’.[9] However, he shared with many of his generation in the north of England a very personal sense of the devastation brought by the First World War to the members of the armed forces, whether they died or physically survived the conflict, and their families and communities, who had to live with the loss of a generation of husbands and fathers, sons and brothers, farmhands and factory workers, clerks and administrators, doctors and dock workers.

‘Six Young men’ is an elegy ostensibly recording the thoughts and emotions evoked in a relatively young poet (composed when Hughes was twenty-six) from looking at a photograph of six friends of his father, William who had fought in the First World War. William Hughes enlisted in the 1st/6th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, and took part in the disastrous attack on Gallipoli (February 1915-January 1916). The plan was to weaken the Central Powers through defeating their southern ally, the Ottoman Empire, and by taking control of the strategically important Dardanelles strait which separates Asia from Europe.

After suffering appalling loses – along with regiments from Australia, New Zealand and France – the Lancashire Fusiliers were evacuated from Gallipoli and reassigned to the Western Front where William was said to have been saved from certain death when a piece of shrapnel lodged in his paybook, which by good fortune was in his left breast pocket covering his heart.[10] The six men in the poem were not so fortunate; within six months of the photograph being taken, the poem tells us, all six were dead.

‘Six Young Men’ is one of six war poems placed at the end of Hughes’s first published collection The Hawk In The Rain.[11] It was later republished in Elmet, Hughes’s collection of elegiac poems, accompanied by bleakly beautiful black and white landscape photographs by Fay Godwin, commemorating the area on the border of Yorkshire and Lancashire centred on the Calder Valley where Hughes was born and spent his earliest years.[12] In his introduction to Elmet, Hughes describes the area as a place where ‘cataclysms had happened […] you were living among the survivors, in the remains’ of an area devastated by industrial decline, but also by the loss of men – like the six young men of the photograph – ‘in the first World War, where a single bad ten minutes in no man’s land would wipe out a street or even a village’ (Elmet, p. 11).

‘Six young men’ is not only studied, alongside the better known ‘Bayonet Charge’ (also included in the group of First World War poems in The Hawk in The Rain) but in 2007 was itself memorialised. The Elmet Trust, a small group of Hughes devotees based in Yorkshire, erected a plaque on the site where Hughes indicates, in the second stanza, the photograph was taken. The plaque reads:

TED HUGHES O.M.

WROTE A POEM CALLED

‘SIX YOUNG MEN’

INSPIRED BY A PHOTOGRAPH

TAKEN AT THIS SPOT

JUST BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR.

THEY ALL FOUGHT FOR KING AND COUNTRY

AND ALL MADE THE SUPREME SACRIFICE.

“LEST WE FORGET”

THE ELMET TRUST

The plaque is, I think, uniquely both a war memorial and a commemoration of a poem written four decades later by someone who was born more than two decades after the war ended and was neither a casualty nor even a combatant in any subsequent conflict. This plaque gives ‘Six Young Men’ prominence and status, one which I’m not sure it merits, especially when read alongside other war poems or poems about war written by poets, especially Robert Graves who fought with conspicuous bravery and was severely wounded in the First World War, but also a number of Hughes’s contemporaries too. The poem describes four ordinary young men:

One chews a grass, one lowers his eyes, bashful,

One is ridiculous with cocky pride –

Six months later they were all dead. (Elmet, p. 112)

There is a harsh, performative brutalism in the words and the broken rhythm of that final line, and each stanza of the poem ends with a line that is evidently intended to shock a reader by its sudden brutality:

Pictured here, their expressions listen yet,

And still the valley has not changed its sound

Though their faces are four decades under the ground.

Similarly, at the end of stanza three: ‘But come to the worst thy must have done, and held it | Closer than their hope; all were killed,’ and stanza four: ‘his smile | Forty years into soil’ (Elmet, p. 113).

After brusquely dealing with the deaths of three of the men in the photograph, Hughes or his narrator seems to get bored or impatient with the remaining three, declaring: ‘The rest, nobody knows what they came to, | But come to the worst they must have done.’

‘Nobody knows’? Very unlikely. ‘I don’t know’ would seem to be much closer to the truth, and there is also a suspicion of ‘I don’t care’.

A reader familiar with poems written by soldiers on active service, poems in which, as Wilfred Owen wrote ‘the subject is war and the pity of war’ and in which ‘the poetry is in the pity’[13] will find anger in Hughes’s poem, and a didactic impulse to shock or horrify, also a familiar Hughesian tendency, even in this early work, of avoiding personal human engagement by objectifying and mythicising, but little pity. Hughes does, however, link one of the men’s smile preserved in the photograph with the rather sentimental image of a locket, but almost immediately turns it into an agonised grimace: ‘The locket of a smile, turned overnight | Into the hospital of his mangled last | Agony’ (the reference to ‘hospital’ indicates that this death agony must have been imagined for one of the soldiers of whom ‘nobody knows what they came to’.)

In the final stanza, however, there is pity and sorrow, expressed in fractured, faux-Shakespearean diction; a sharp contrast to the straight-talking style of the previous four stanzas. But the pity isn’t for the six young men. It seems that what is now affecting the narrator is the realisation that he too will die, but the language is oblique and the syntax deliberately dense and perplexing. The narrator’s fear is exemplified in the following nine lines, which form one long sentence glued together by three commas two semi-colons, as if by extending the sentence the narrator felt he was overcoming death. It’s the fear to which Philip Larkin admits in his poem ‘Aubade’; but Larkin acknowledges it with much more clarity and honesty:

I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.[14]

The Last Day of Leave (1916)

There could surely be no more telling contrast than reading ‘Six Young Men’ against Robert Graves’s ‘The Last Day of Leave (1916)’ (Selected Poems, pp. 78–9), which relates a memory of a small group of friends – five rather than six – all facing an uncertain future shortly to result in either death, bereavement or life-changing injuries for everyone. The group consists of two couples with the narrator playing ‘gooseberry’:

We were in love: he with her; she with him

And I, the youngest one, the odd man out

As deep in love with a yet nameless muse. (p. 78)

The poem recalls a perfect late-summer day. After swimming in the lake (‘Diving like trout between the lily groves’) the five friends picnic beside the lily lake from a ‘basket nobly filled:|wine and fresh rolls, chicken and pineapple’; a spread that would not have disgraced the water rat in Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in The Willows.

It’s an idealised account of the day because that is what significant happy memories, even those touched with tragedy, become; and the poet/narrator is well aware of the party’s ‘braggadocio under threat of war’, and lets the reader know the tensions of the war, if not the proximity of destruction, are close at hand in his recollection that, sentry-like‘never less than three kept by the fire’. And at day’s end the others turn to the Gravesian narrator for ‘a blind-fate-aversive afterword’ which, at the moment of writing he can now provide: ‘We were all there, all five of us in love | Not one yet killed, widowed or broken-hearted.’ (p. 78)

Graves’s poem is obviously a piece of Ars Poetica – a poem whose subject, like Hughes’s in ‘Six Young Men’ is the writing of the poem – but it is much more. There is a measured dignity in the slow and melancholy unravelling of the day, event by event; a subtle irony in many of the tiny incidents: fear hinted at in the sheep ‘galloping off in terror’; danger represented by the ‘deep water and shelving bank’; perhaps a prefiguring of the rough, improvised, hand-to-mouth life of an army in the field in the memory of boiling of a kettle on a camp fire fed with foraged wood; also in the repeated references to lilies, the flowers indicative of purity and innocence, but also associated with sympathy and bereavement. And of course, the title, with its obvious allusion to taking leave, in the sense of bidding farewell, when of course none would fare well in the immediate future.

I think it’s ironic that, considering his later disparaging of Auden, Graves’s ‘The Last Day of Leave’ reminds one of lines from ‘A Summer Night’ when the poet wishes to recapture:

These evenings when

Fear gave his watch no look;

The lion griefs loped from the shade

And on our knees their muzzles laid,

And Death put down his book.[15]

A further irony of course being that the very mention of ‘fear’, ‘griefs’ and ‘death’ bring them into the very centre of the experience. In the same way, the gaze of the narrator’s four friends in ‘The Last Day of Leave’ appear, in retrospect, to be ‘appealing’ in the way the condemned might appeal against the blind justice of the blind fate that awaits them.

Wounds

Ted Hughes insisted that his father never talked about his experiences in the Great War although, as Jonathan Bate recounts in his biography of Ted Hughes, Hughes’s older sister Olwyn had quite different memories.

When Ted was four and Olwyn six, for half a year every Sunday morning their father stayed in bed and they came in with him, and said, ‘Tell us about the war.’ He told them everything, in the goriest detail, including things not very suitable for a four-year-old boy. Dismembered bodies, arm sticking out of the mud. Ted either suppressed or forgot all this later, saying that his father never talked about the war.[16]

Longley recalls more clearly his English father occasionally speaking about his experiences in the First World War as a young captain.

My father fought in the First World War […] and I have often wondered what he would have made of the Troubles in the North and [‘Wounds’] is a poem which explores that wondering.

My father was a representative of a generation, the remnants of a generation that survived that nightmare of the First World War. The Edwardian dream ended in 1914; mechanised slaughter became the norm, and the world has never been the same since. At the age of 16 my father had enlisted in 1914, one of thousands queuing up outside Buckingham Palace. He joined the London Scottish by mistake, wearing an unwarranted kilt [...]. He recalled the lice, the rats, the mud, the tedium, the terror. Somehow, my father's existence, and his experience, the stories he passed on to me, gave me a kind of taproot into the war.

The tragedy of the Somme affects all of Ulster. Every little village and town has its own war memorial, and many of the recorded names fell in that particular battle. My father's own experiences, which he recounted vividly on only a couple of occasions, have allowed me to participate in the community's glum pride.[17]

Like Hughes, Longley begins ‘Wounds’ with pictures, but these are recollections of pictures not on ‘celluloid’ (as Hughes oddly claims, celluloid being the medium of cine film or negative not photographic prints) but ‘From my father’s head – | I have kept them like secrets until now.’[18]

Witnessing the ferocity and bravery of the Protestant troops from the North of Ireland, what seems to have impressed and shocked Longley’s English father was the unabashed sectarianism of their battle cries: ‘Going over the top with ‘Fuck the Pope!’ | ’No Surrender!’ (Ash Keys, p. 29),

and it is sectarianism which forms one of the main threads binding together Longley’s father’s memories of the war with Longley’s own memories of ‘The Troubles’.

He recalls his father’s memory of the prudish last rites of the regimental chaplain:

Resettling kilts with his swagger-stick,

With a stylish back hand and a prayer.

Over a landscape of dead buttocks (p. 29)

He then reflects on his father’s funeral half a century later:

Now, with military honours of a kind,

With his badges, his medals like rainbows,

His spinning compass, I bury him. (p. 29)

But as Longley is aware, ‘military honours’ has now a more sinister meaning. Another conflict is being fought out at the time of writing; a multi-sided civil war involving the IRA and other armed republican groups, the UDA, UVF and other protestant paramilitaries, and the British army and the police – all of whom bury their dead with real or appropriated military honours. Moving on from his father’s memories and his father’s funeral, Longley honours the more recent dead: three young soldiers (of about the same age as Longley’s father when he enlisted), killed in an ambush while on a night out ‘three teenage soldiers, bellies full of | Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone’; a young child accidentally killed by a shot from a British soldier (‘put out | The night-light in a nursery for ever’); and finally a bus conductor ‘shot through the head | By a shivering boy.’

This image brings the poem back full circle. Part of the training for this young murderer would doubtless have been to think of himself as a soldier: bravely fighting against colonialism if a member of a republican paramilitary, or defending his community against ‘popery’ if a member of a Unionist paramilitary and repeating the same battle cry as the young Ulster soldiers on the Somme: ‘No Surrender!’

Except this ‘shivering boy’ is suddenly overcome by shame at killing not a soldier but a bus conductor in his home, in front of his family and the poem ends with a whimper: ‘I think ‘Sorry Missus’ was what he said.’ The men of violence regarded ‘The Troubles’ as years of struggle; but Longley called them ‘the years of disgrace’.[19]

In a programme first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2024 to celebrate his 85th birthday and the publication of a new selected poems entitled Ash Keys, the Irish writer and broadcaster Olivia O’Leary paid this tribute to Michael Longley:

For journalists like me reporting on the violence, poets could bring a different perspective to what we were seeing every day. Michael Longley never let the bomb or the bullet or the act of violence itself be the headline, which perhaps we often did as journalists reporting on the run. What Michael extracted from the rubble of the bombs and bullets and statistics was the value and the dignity of individual lives: the murdered greengrocer, ice cream seller, bus conductor and the grief of their families and their communities.[20]

MCMXIV

My final notes are on ‘MCMXIV’ by Philip Larkin, a poem by a poet who is often seen as an antagonist or antithesis of Ted Hughes, the first poet I wrote about.[21] The use of Roman numerals in the title is not an affectation, but how the year of the start of the First World War is inscribed on countless British war memorials.

The poem is like a rapid sequence of snapshots of the first day of the war, when lines of willing recruits formed. There is no indication of any specific source for the rapid flow of images, as there has been in the previous poems considered. With consummate skill Larkin selects small, poignant almost insignificant details of everyday life in 1914, all of which indicate how very different, how very much more closely connected with the distant past pre-World War One Britain was compared to the post-Second World War Britain in which Larkin was writing:

The farthings and sovereigns,

And dark-clothed children at play

Called after kings and queens,

The tin advertisements

For – cocoa and twist, and the pubs

Wide open all day. (Whitsun Weddings, p. 28)

The poem is in four stanzas of eight lines, but is a single sentence, with concrete image following concrete image until the first two lines of the final stanza when a narrator makes their voice unmistakably heard with comments which bring the first abstractions into the poem: ‘Never such innocence again, | Never before or since’. The first line of that stanza is repeated at the end of the poem, a final epitaph connecting to the memorial Roman numerals of the title:

Without a word – the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again. (p. 29)

Visualising the First World War

One of the most striking characteristics these poems all share is their attempt to visualise, recall, arrange or create images of the war. Larkin was a keen and accomplished photographer and presents a series of still images as if, in reading the poem, we are turning over the pages of a pre-digital photograph album. ‘MCMXIV’ is also a masterpiece of unobtrusive craftsmanship and restrained emotion; of pity for the young men who in their misguided shared enthusiasm will die in their hundreds of thousands measured in the unregarded minutiae of everyday life that will so soon be lost to them, and them to it.

Michael Longley, younger than Larkin by almost two decades, grew to adulthood in the age of not only cinema newsreels but also daily news bulletins on television, and watched the nightly bombings, rioting and shootings in his native city on the nightly TV news. He creates the equivalent of a news feature, combining archive film and contemporary video clips with a narrative which both links and contrasts the war in which his father fought and the civil war being waged in the city where he and his family were living; where the victims were not a foreign enemy but the local ice cream man, bus conductor or as happened just before my first visit to Belfast, a student picked at random and shot outside the university where Longley’s wife, the critic Edna Longley, was teaching.

Robert Graves, writing during the second war, recalls an almost unbearably poignant moment of innocent fragile happiness from ‘his war’[22] as a slow-paced dream or vision of a hazy, distant summer day which ended with a premonition of the deaths and bereavements that would come. The dream is retold in tones of both familiarity and formality, as if confiding in someone trusted, but not an intimate friend as the people in the dream picnic are. It’s as if the day is being recalled in a therapeutic session – possibly with someone like Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, who shared Graves’s belief in the significance of dreams, if not in the same areas, and who died shortly after the war itself ended.[23]

It is ‘Six Young Men’, the poem which claims to originate from a specific image and has become a war memorial of sorts, that I find most disappointing. Like so many of Hughes’s poems it is a poem about the writing specifically the struggle to write, the poem one is reading. The most successful poem that Hughes wrote of this kind is ‘The Thought-Fox’[24] and perhaps it’s significant that in ‘The Thought-Fox’ the poet is alone with an animal, and significantly one of his own imagining which he has hunted down and ‘captured’.[25] At the centre of ‘Six Young Men’, as so often in Hughes’s poetry, is the struggle for authenticity; in particular, as Carrie Smith describes it in her illuminating book on the extensive archive of Hughes’s drafts, manuscripts, letters and other writings,[26] how to ‘authentically and seriously represent grief’. Long before he was appointed Poet Laureate, Hughes had assumed the responsibilities of being ‘shaman of the tribe’, as Seamus Heaney called it, which the Polish critic and philologist Ewa Panecka has explained meant ‘to put his readers in vital imaginative contact with the geological, botanical, historical and legendary reality of England’.[27] It is weight of this self-imposed task that overwhelms ‘Six Young Men’, which lurches from the imagined deaths scenes of three of the men, to a final stanza marred by Hughes’s attempts to extract universal significances from the deaths of men about whose lives he knew nothing.

In Moortown, Hughes’s collection about his brief experience of working on a farm, he was able once again able to focus on animals rather than people until Jack Orchard, Hughes father-in-law, the farm manager and Hughes’s business partner, died. For personal grief and loss of a dear friend, as well as feeling committed to be faithful to his self-directed project to record his experiences as honestly as he could in the form of a day-by-day diary, Hughes felt obliged to write an elegy for Jack. Carrie Smith, who studied the various drafts of ‘The Day He Died’, the poem which eventually resulted, observes in her excellent book The Page Is Printed that similar to his other elegies, the question that Hughes asks is once again: ‘Why will no-one or nothing save us from death?’ (p. 186). Acknowledging the struggle which Hughes understandably experienced in writing the poem, Smith proposes that ‘it is not just the author’s experience that gives the poem authenticity, but also the struggle of composition which testifies to the truth of the emotion expressed’ (p. 187). I disagree. I also disagree with the common assumption – which seems all too present in ‘Six Young Men – ’ that the worth of a poem resides in the largeness of the poet’s ambition, the sincerity of his sense of mission, or the profundity of the ideas which are expressed or alluded to in the poem. As Edward Thomas, a poet who fought and died in the First World War, so wisely observed: ‘Anything, however small, may make a poem; nothing, however great, is certain to.’[28]

Mick Gowar is widely known as an author of children’s books and a teacher of creative writing. Since 1980 he has written or edited over one hundred books for children and young people, including books of poetry, novels, short stories and non-fiction books for educational series including Oxford University Press’s Treetops and Project X. He has visited schools, libraries, colleges and festivals throughout the United Kingdom and abroad to give readings, performances and lead workshops and has undertaken educational projects for, among others, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Britten Sinfonia, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Fitzwilliam Museum and Kettles Yard Gallery in Cambridge. He has tutored at the Arvon Foundation and Taliesin Trust and was a member of the judging panel for the W. H. Smith Young Writers’ Competition. Before retiring he was senior lecturer and university teaching fellow at the Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University. He is currently secretary of the Ted Hughes Society and until January 2025 was editor of the journal Book 2.0.