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seem fatuous, made by a reviewer of his last and posthumous book in the New
Statesman (which of course never published a line by Higgins while he was alive; despite or because of the abusive letters Higgins used to hurl at its editor)...Useless to speculate what he might have done or been; but with his going there closed a window which would have let fresh air into the hothouse. Some of us might have felt the draught."
170:. Wright amusingly goes on to recall: "More than once Swift and I had to sit on his head to stop him writing furious letters full of impossible pecuniary demands to whichever was the unfortunate publisher of the moment. Higgins would say, with impenetrable logic: 'Look, it's going to cost them £500 to publish these rubbishy poems. Why don't they give me the £500 and not publish?' "
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And David Wright on
Higgins in Poetry Review: "Martin Seymour-Smith remarks in his Guide to Modern World Literature, ‘a hit-or-miss poet . . . who had too little time to exercise control over his considerable intelligence’. But one or two of his poems sustain a comparison with Blake, that else might
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says that "his best poems were full of urgency ... primitive energy and directness of purpose", and that "in some twenty poems, including ‘Snow and Poetry’ and ‘A Slight Unease’, he achieved a surprisingly precise, elegant and metaphysical voice that might well have been developed had he lived."
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wrote that
Higgins "had perceived that the secret at the heart of affairs constituted the most ingenious practical joke, which only a man who was at one and the same time a mathematician and a poet of sentiment could start functioning for the amusement and edification of all concerned." Higgins
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footballer. He then became a schoolteacher; but soon abandoned this for a literary career, at which he was also unsuccessful. After living from hand to mouth for some years, he died of a rare heart disease. As a poet he first came to attention through
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Thus states the biographical note on the endpaper of Brian
Higgins's first book of poems, "The Only Need". Brian Higgins died in 1965, before his third book of poems "The Northern Fiddler" appeared. In an introduction to this book the poet
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Macmillan Guide to Modern World
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333:: X a Quarterly Review. Volume 2 Number 2, Barrie & Rockliff, London (1961)
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Essays. 1st UK in dj.,BARKER, George, MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1970,
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The cock of my eye to the sun and the laugh of my soul to the dark,
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For allowance is made in the rules that the world is a mess,
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And a line through incorellate points is my strange epitaph
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For I am one of the faceless signs, one of the
Welfare Men.
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Add him up on the left and the right and it balances neat
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Poetry
Magazines, David Wright, Another Part of the Wood
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A knife in my guts is the line of a pen through my mark
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Plus or minus a few perhaps, but it's right—just about.
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Irish poet, mathematician & rugby league footballer
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A few blank months—but we soon got him working again”.
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called himself "a realist who wished to be romantic".
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The decimals stutter and this is the lie they repeat.
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The amount of Time spent related to What is
Produced
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Yes, ordinate and abscissa, they chose for the graph
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222:Higgins, Brian (December 2001).
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325:Reference and further reading
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39:(1930 –1965) was an Irish
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234:(6): 1259.
388:Categories
374:Poetry Mag
340:Indian Uni
255:4 February
210:References
59:", Soho.’
351:Poem for
139:Yorkshire
73:Biography
32:, c.1960
250:11821322
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168:London
135:Batley
128:, 1960
124:From
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246:PMID
185:Work
41:poet
236:doi
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