Poet Jeremy Halvard Prynne died last week.
Australian John Kinsella, who came to know Prynne from his time at Cambridge University where Prynne lectured, holds Prynne’s ouevre in very high regard. ‘J.H. Prynne is possibly the most significant English poet of the late twentieth century’, he and Rod Mengham wrote in their essay (‘An Introduction to the Poetry of J.H. Prynne by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella’).
In the ‘London Review of Books’ last week, Ian Patterson (poet, translator and academic and Life Fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge) wrote that:
‘Prynne’s poems have sometimes been dismissed by more mainstream cultural commentators as meaningless, absurdly difficult, unapproachable, pointless, elitist, or simply as nonsense or charlatanism. There is a long tradition of conservative lyric anecdotalism in English poetry, and in the way poetry is taught, that turns away from a poem that is not readily approachable. It’s true that poems like Prynne’s are difficult, in the way that a great deal of poetry is difficult if by that you mean it’s hard to approach at first reading. Poetry is an art that requires and rewards patient study, rereading, attending to paralinguistic features such as rhythm, rhyme, lineation, spacing on the page, and opening yourself to the poem, attending to the way it works on your feelings and in your body as well as on your mind, rather than just trying to manoeuvre what the poem ‘says’ into a plausible paraphrase.’
There’s further mention of Prynne’s poetry and career at ‘London Review of Books’ as well as at The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/apr/23/extraordinary-and-original-poet-jh-prynne-dies, and at Bloodaxe Books, which notes that ‘JH Prynne was Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they were in the life work of J.H. Prynne.’