Geoffrey Dearmer

Geoffrey Dearmer (21 March 1893 – 18 August 1996) was a British poet. He was the son of Anglican liturgist and hymnologist Percy Dearmer and the artist and writer Mabel Dearmer.

School and university life Stephen Gwynn, a writer closely associated with Dearmer's family, recorded that Dearmer had disliked school but blossomed at university: I have seen a boy who was consistently and persistently and indomitably unhappy during all the phases of his school life, turn into a creature radiant, walking on air, swimming in felicity, from the moment that he became an undergraduate. Bliss lasted for two years and then there was trouble about exams: but Geoffrey Dearmer – for he is my example – had got as much as anyone I ever knew of the real Oxford teaching, which is given by the atmosphere and surroundings and associations and companionships of the place.

Service in the First World War Dearmer served first (in 1915) with the Royal Fusiliers at Gallipoli, where his younger brother, Christopher, a pilot with the Royal Naval Air Service, had been recently killed in action, and then with the Royal Army Service Corps on the Western Front in France. Dearmer's mother, Mabel, died in Serbia while serving as a paramedic with a Red Cross ambulance unit, for which her husband, the Revd Percy Dearmer, was acting as chaplain.

Dearmer was appointed a lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order. Simultaneously, he served as editor of the BBC radio Children's Hour programme. The Geoffrey Dearmer Award for new poets was founded in his memory in 1998.

Poetic works Many of Dearmer's war poems dealt with the overall brutality of war and violence, of which he was a direct eyewitness. These poems enjoyed a brief popularity during and immediately after World War I but were later overshadowed by the starker works of other war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Dearmer's poems were never infused with anger or despair and often revealed his unshakable Christian faith.

Dearmer was also a poet of nature. A critic who knew him well rated his garden poetry as highly as his war poems, quoting these lines as an example:

Collections Poems, 1918 A Day's Delight, 1923 A Pilgrim's Song, John Murray, 1993