Frederick Stuart Grubb

Career He was a contributor to Cambridge Left, whose former contributors included W. H. Auden, Gavin Ewart and Charles Madge, as well as Donald MacLean and other communists.

Grubb was a member of the Group (a club and loose poetic movement including Philip Hobsbaum, Peter Redgrove, Edward Lucie-Smith and others), and later the Poets' Workshop, where poets discussed one another's writing. In his history of British poetry, Martin Booth remembers Grubb as a "forcefully vociferous but never unthinking" critic.

In the 1980s, he taught English at the Open University and at universities in Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. One obituarist compared him to "the great Victorian letter writers, crafting long diatribes packed with criticism, satire, politics and comment."

However, Grubb later "renounced" the collection and his later poetry has yet to be collected. Similarly, Shirley Toulson found that "it is among his contemporaries — Larkin, Porter, Hughes — that Grubb is most alive and perceptive," and praised Grubb's emphasis on "social context" and the poet "as a public being," which she compared favourably to "the 'inner life' approach." And Martin Booth considers Grubb "the first book critic to seriously consider Ted Hughes's animal poetry as well as the poetry of the then-developing Peter Porter." And Toynbee was unconvinced by Grubb's "attempt to impose a general theme … that only 'liberal' poetry can be good poetry," finding that "Lionel Trilling faced the issue more squarely."

Selected publications Poetry The Imperfect Day: A Long Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge Express, 1953). Title Deeds and Other Poems (London: Longmans, Green, 1961). September Sun (Frensham, Surrey: Sceptre Press, 1969). Frog (Rushden, Northants.: Sceptre Press, 1972).

Prose A Vision of Reality: A study of Liberalism in Twentieth-Century Verse (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965).

As editor Michael Roberts, Selected Poems and Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 1980).