William Plomer: Selected Poems

He was E. M Forster’s ‘favorite contemporary poet’. W. H Auden extolled his ‘first-class visual imagination’. Stephen Spender considered his output ‘among the best English poems written in the present century’. Yet for most readers, William Plomer (1903—1973) is now a faintly-remembered name. Born in Pietersburg, South Africa, Plomer settled in London in 1929, where he went on to occupy a central position in English letters. By the time of his death he had published ten books of poetry. In a voice impersonal and strange, Plomer’s best poems reveal a mind that delights in the ‘sensory, pictorial and plastic’ (though not, as he thought, at the expense of the metaphysical).