Peter Russell

Irwin Peter Russell, poet, critic and publisher: born Bristol 16 September 1921; married first 1951 Marjorie Keeling-Bloxam (one stepson; marriage dissolved 1963), second Lana Long (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved); died San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy 22 January 2003

Peter Russell was one of the most extraordinary and multi-faceted poets of the latter part of the 20th century. He was a romantic, classicist and modernist rolled into one: a Petrarchan sonneteer and a Rochesterian epigrammatist, a visionary neo-Platonic Blakean lyricist and an exponent of free-form epic in the manner of Ezra Pound and Hugh MacDiarmid.

He brilliantly transformed and parodied his own personality, life and times into the fiction of the exiled reprobate "Quintilius", a decadent, well-travelled, garrulously opinionated and quasi-prophetic late Latin poet whose magnum opus, the protean Apocalypse of Quintilius has still only been partially published (1997, edited by Glyn Pursglove). The span of Russell's poems ranges from the exuberant chant which opens Dreamland and Drunkenness (1963) – "Life is a celebration not a search for success" – to the harrowing revelations of old age that close down his last poems, Living Death (2002).

In his individualism and eccentricities, in his diction and dualism, and in his manners and manias, Russell was an Englishman – or rather, Anglo-Irishman – to the core. As poet and polymath, he was a cosmopolitan of European and global stature. He taught himself Arabic in order to read Ibn Al'Arabi, Persian to read Rumi and Russian because, at a London party in the late 1940s, he was moved to tears at hearing an ageing emigrée reciting lines from Osip Mandelstam. Later he became Mandelstam's first English translator and publisher. He spoke and wrote a perfect Italian, charmed with the sort of Anglicised intonations of a Gielgud reciting Shakespeare.

An outsider and radical by choice and predilection, Peter Russell's background offers clues to why he never quite fitted in anywhere. His Anglo-Irish mother, Marjorie Fortune, married his "Bristol-Irish" father Irwin George Russell when he was in his late teens and she already in her mid-thirties. Marjorie, who had a "deformation of arms and legs", had inherited a fortune, and brought Peter and his elder brother Tony up, first as Catholics, then sent them to (different) Protestant schools. With his marked Bristol accent, Peter's father could not have been more different: he ran a small garage business, vulcanising tyres.

An early and avid reader, Peter Russell attended a prep school in Malvern and, from 1935 to 1939, Malvern College, where he excelled in the sciences, English, modern languages and the classics. He was a natural scholar with a retentive memory for detail and an insatiable and rebellious curiosity. He left school with a place to read Natural Sciences at King's College Cambridge. But he volunteered as soon as the Second World War broke out and saw active service in Europe and the Far East, much of it atrocious, and suffered from nightmares for years afterwards. He was involved in the Arnhem débâcle and in hand-to-hand jungle combat in Burma, and later gave his stepson Christopher a Japanese sword he had taken from a surrendered Japanese officer.

He returned from the war a Communist, although that did not last long. His politics for the rest of his life were as complex as his personality. He called himself a pluralist. There was a Byronic streak in him and a wicked, even Swiftian, sense of humour. He took pleasure in taking swipes at the conventions and correctnesses of left and right alike, was distrustful of politicians, and was never afraid to be outspoken and combative, frequently to his own disadvantage. Nevertheless he was blessed with lifelong friendships among people of widely varied persuasions.

In the Forties, he lived in London and got to know more or less everyone who was anyone in the literary world. During this time he developed his deserved reputation as an accomplished and devoted drinker, and tender and appreciative womaniser. He lectured part-time to support himself while reading English at Queen Mary College, but left in irritation without bothering to take a degree. Throughout his life, he published his work with small and often obscure presses.

In the late Forties he discovered Ezra Pound and achieved distinction as a critic, editor and publisher. In 1949 he founded the literary magazine Nine, and in 1950 the Pound Press. Both ran till 1956. He published Tom Scott's masterly translations of François Villon into Lallans and the first-ever English translations of Mandelstam, Jorge Luis Borges and Boris Pasternak.

In 1950, Russell edited An Examination of Ezra Pound, a collection of essays by T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, Edith Sitwell and others which was instrumental in obtaining Pound's eventual release from the Saint Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, DC, in 1958.

In 1954, he had also published his own Three Elegies of Quintilius, and, so he said, was tickled pink when an anonymous reviewer in a distinguished literary journal wrote to the effect that the translation was not a patch on the original.

From 1951 he ran a bookshop in Tunbridge Wells and then in London. But he was too bohemian to last as a businessman. He went bankrupt in 1963, and emigrated first to Berlin and then in 1965 to Venice. Apart from short periods in teaching in Yugoslavia, Canada, the United States and Iran, Venice and then Tuscany remained his home for 40 years. He became increasingly authoritative as a neo-Platonist thinker in the Blakean tradition and as an authority on Dante, and he has no small claim to being considered a bone fide Italian poet in his own right.

In his last years he was lionised throughout Italy. But this brought in hardly any money and most of the time he was very poor. Until his final illness, he lived in a damp old water mill (La Turbina) down a long winding muddy valley lane, drove a rattly old jalopy, and seemed to have turned into a sort of snowy haired and slippered Wild Man of the Woods. Towards the end, the Royal Literary Fund and the town council of Pian di Scò in Tuscany both helped him financially.

Many of his books have been published in Italy. Translations have been made by his son Peter George, and by Pier Paolo Donovan and others. The University of Salzburg has published numerous volumes, as well as two Festschrifts edited by James Hogg and a 250-page bibliography edited by Glyn Pursglove. In the UK, Russell's work has been strongly advocated and published by Enitharmon Press, Littack, Anvil Press, Acumen and the Swansea Review. The poet Kathleen Raine, a lifelong friend, supported his work and published it in her magazine Temenos. William Cookson, who died just a few weeks before Russell, was also a close friend and his magazine Agenda was strongly influenced by Nine.

Until his final blindness, Russell wrote incessantly. Despite several fires which destroyed his manuscripts on two occasions (one in East Hoathly, 1961; and in Pian di Scò, 1990), he leaves behind him a huge archive of unpublished poems. Sifting through these presents a mammoth editorial task. From among them no doubt more gems will fall out, rough-hewn or polished.

The last time I saw Peter Russell, although he was near the end, there were moments when he seemed at ease with himself, and a bit of his old defiant self-pride crept back. "My poems belong to the world," he said, sticking his chin out in that odd schoolboyish way of his – in a sort of cross between the Cheshire Cat and Just William.

Richard Burns