John Heath-Stubbs

John Francis Alexander Heath-Stubbs (9 July 1918 – 26 December 2006) was an English poet and translator. He is known for verse influenced by classical myths, and for a long Arthurian poem, "Artorius".

Biography and works Heath-Stubbs was born in Streatham, London. The family later lived in Hampstead. His parents were Francis Heath-Stubbs, a non-practising, independently wealthy solicitor, and his wife Edith Louise Sara, a concert pianist under her maiden name, Edie Marr. His boyhood was largely spent near the New Forest.

The Stubbs family were gentry from Staffordshire; Heath-Stubbs's great-great-grandfather Joseph, a younger son, married Mary, the only child of a judge named Heath, this eventually becoming part of the family name. Heath-Stubbs stated in his autobiography Hindsights (1993), "In my grandfather's day, the last of the Heaths made us Stubbses her heirs, so long as we changed our name to Heath-Stubbs." Furthermore, "according to family tradition", they were related to the pamphleteer John Stubbs, who was sentenced to the loss of his right hand by Queen Elizabeth I for his opposition to negotiations for her marriage to Francis, Duke of Anjou, and yet remained a staunch royalist. "Family pride, combining with a poised self-irony" marked Heath-Stubbs's poem Epitaph, beginning, "Mr Heath-Stubbs as you must understand/Came of a gentleman's family out of Staffordshire/Of as good blood as any in England/But he was wall-eyed and his legs too spare."

Heath-Stubbs was educated at Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight and at the age of 21 entered Queen's College, Oxford, where he read English, finding the lectures of Nevill Coghill and C. S. Lewis particularly rewarding. He became a poetry adviser to the firm of Routledge, co-editing Eight Oxford Poets in 1941, with Sidney Keyes and Michael Meyer,

Although diagnosed with glaucoma at the age of 18, a condition he inherited from his father, he was able to read with his left eye until 1961, but was completely blind from 1978.

Poetry collections