Ted Walker - Poetry and Short Stories

Poetry and Short Stories

In 1963 Walker obtained a teaching post in Bognor Regis and from there moved to Chichester High School. He had also started to write poetry regularly and of a quality that made it welcome in journals such as The Listener, The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Magazine. It drew the attention of William Plomer, then poetry editor at Jonathan Cape and a powerful figure in the poetry world. Walker had also submitted poems to The New Yorker, where Howard Moss made his work welcome. The fee which Walker received for his first poem to be published in The New Yorker, "Breakwaters" (published June, 1963) helped him to move back to his native Sussex. Looking for a new source of income, Walker taught himself the art of short story writing, and his first short story, "Estuary", appeared in The New Yorker in April 1964.

Other key influences on his literary development included the Welsh poet Leslie Norris and canon of Chichester Cathedral, the Scotsman Andrew Young, both near neighbours, as well as the critic Robert Gittings.

Walker's first book of verse, Fox on a Barn Door, focused on the Sussex countryside and coast. The titles of a good third of the poems - such as "Breakwaters", "The Skate Fishers" and "On the Sea Wall" are about the shoreline of Lancing and Shoreham. The South Downs likewise provided inspiration.