J.H. Prynne, "an enigmatic poet who became a cult figure--and, to some, one of Britain's most inventive literary voices--despite an aversion to giving interviews or readings or doing much of anything to help readers navigate his richly intellectual, at times impenetrable works," died on April 22, the New York Times reported. He was 89. Prynne was also a literary critic, known for analyses of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens, as well as an art critic.
For nearly 40 years, he taught and was the librarian at Caius College at Cambridge University. Prynne "was hailed as a leading light of the so-called Cambridge School, a loose aggregation of poets who emerged in the 1960s and were known for their cerebral approach, marked by late Modernist experimentation," the Times wrote.
In a 1987 Times of London piece, author Peter Ackroyd described Prynne as "without doubt the most formidable and accomplished poet in England today, a writer who has single-handedly changed the vocabulary of expression."
One of Prynne's best known poems, "The Ideal Star-Fighter," originally published in his collection Brass (1971), begins, "Now a slight meniscus floats on the moral pigment of these times, producing displacement of the body image, the politic albino."
In a critical appraisal in 2020 in the Chicago Review, Luke Roberts observed: "Part of the prestige of Prynne's poetry is its much-vaunted (and perhaps equally derided) difficulty, and the usual claim about reading Prynne's work involves the experience of bafflement, frustration, doubt, and dead-ends, all exhilarating in their own way."
Prynne's output was prolific, including "dozens of publications, often booklets of fewer than 40 pages, almost exclusively released through small presses," the New York Times noted. A major collection of past work, Poems (1999), was more than 400 pages, and a follow-up, Poems, 2016-24, added more than 700 pages of new material.
His other collections include Kitchen Poems (1968), The White Stones (1969), Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011), To Pollen (2006), Biting the Air (2003), Triodes (1999), Her Weasels Wild Returning (1993), Not-You (1993), Poems (1982), and more
"I am frequently accused of having more or less altogether taken leave of discernible sense," he said in a 2007 lecture. "In fact, I believe this accusation to be more or less true, and not to me alarmingly so, because what for so long has seemed the arduous royal road into the domain of poetry--'what does it mean?' seems less and less an unavoidably necessary precondition for successful reading."
The Times noted that despite the complexity of much of his work, "Poem 48," included in Snooty Tipoffs (2021), "avoids the philosophical complexity he was known for--and indeed, might be read as an acknowledgment of that complexity's limits":
When the heart stops, its business concluded
there's not much to do, however deluded;
immortal longings, like belongings,
abandon their fate at the turnstile's gate.