James Reeves

Biography John Morris Reeves was born in the London Borough of Harrow, elder son of Albert John Reeves, a company secretary, and Ethel Mary, née Blench. He attended Nevill House school at Eastbourne, then Stowe School, where he won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge. From 1932 to 1952, he taught English in a number of schools and teachers' training colleges, subsequently becoming a freelance author and editor.

His first collection of poems, The Natural Need, was published in 1936 by the Seizin Press, run by Robert Graves and Laura Riding, whose work Reeves's early poetry sometimes resembles. Numerous further volumes by Reeves include The Imprisoned Sea (1949), The Talking Skull (1958), and Poems and Paraphrases (1972). Collected Poems of 1974 is the fullest edition of his verses. His best work characteristically combines intensity of mood with an understated manner to distinctive and sometimes haunting lyrical effect. The rural descriptiveness of his less distinguished poetry is elsewhere the vehicle for an ironic pastoralism voicing his disaffection with urban modernity. His books of poetry for children were collected as The Wandering Moon and Other Poems (1973).

As an editor, Reeves was prolific, producing many anthologies of prose and poetry, as well as selections from the work of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Clare, and others, including Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (1959). In this latter book, reprinted several times, he chose to add conventional punctuation to the poems, doing away with her characteristic dashes.

One of his most outstanding poems is "Sky, Sea, Shore": "Stars in a frosty sky Crackle and blaze; Streams in the lowland meadows linger & laze; Shells on the sea shore gleam, washed by the tide; Seagulls over the Barbour Circle & glide. Blue smoke and prancing steed, swallow & swan- How many more Curving, glistening S- things in sky, sea Shore."