Poetry
From the age of 17, when his poetry was first printed in Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse, he acquired a reputation for wit and accomplishment through such works as Phallus in Wonderland and Poems and Songs, which appeared in 1939 and was his first collection.
The Second World War disrupted his development as a poet, however, and he published no further volumes until Londoners of 1964, although he did write the English lyrics for the "World Song" of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. From 1964 he produced many collections, which included The Gavin Ewart Show (1971), No Fool like an Old Fool (1976), All My Little Ones (1978), The Ewart Quarto (1984), and Penultimate Poems (1989). The Collected Ewart: 1933-1980 (1980) was supplemented in 1991 by Collected Poems: 1980-1990.
The intelligence and casually flamboyant virtuosity with which he framed his often humorous commentaries on human behaviour made his work invariably entertaining and interesting. The irreverent eroticism for which his poetry is noted resulted in W. H. Smith's banning of his The Pleasures of the Flesh (1966) from their shops.
As an editor he produced numerous anthologies, including the Penguin Book of Light Verse (1980). He was the 1991 recipient of the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse.
Gavin Ewart's life and poetry are the subject of a book entitled Civil Humor: the Poetry of Gavin Ewart by Stephen W. Delchamps (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002).
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Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.”
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)
“Indeed, the best books have a use, like sticks and stones, which is above or beside their design, not anticipated in the preface, not concluded in the appendix. Even Virgil’s poetry serves a very different use to me today from what it did to his contemporaries. It has often an acquired and accidental value merely, proving that man is still man in the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)