Jeremy Halvard Prynne, known as JH Prynne, a maverick figure in British poetry, died on 22 April at the age of 89.
“Jeremy was an extraordinary and original human, which is no surprise because he was an extraordinary and original poet,” said Peter Gizzi, the American poet who introduced a reissue of Prynne’s 1969 collection The White Stones. “The word ‘genius’ gets tossed around, but if anyone was, he certainly was.”
Born in Bromley, Kent, in June 1936, Prynne served two years in the British army before studying English at Cambridge, graduating in 1960. He pursued a fellowship at Harvard before returning to Cambridge, becoming a fellow at Gonville and Caius college. He ultimately became director of studies in English, and for 37 years was also the college librarian.
Prynne’s first collection, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems, was published in 1962. A second, Kitchen Poems, appeared in 1968. Influenced by the likes of Charles Olson, Prynne bridged American postmodern and British poetry circles, and acted as a liberating force on the latter. He was prolific, publishing dozens of collections across the decades, almost exclusively with small presses, and emerged as a cult figure despite his aversion to publicity, interviews, poetry readings and having his photograph taken.
His work has been collected in two volumes titled Poems, the second of which was published in 2024. “While one might have expected an update of Prynne’s already monumental Poems, the arrival of more than 700 pages of new work is a remarkable turn of events,” wrote David Wheatley in a review. “Here is a book to keep us busy for a very long time.”
A common observation, made by fans and critics alike, was that Prynne’s poetry was hard to parse. “Whether we ‘understood’ Prynne’s poetry or not, we were ardent admirers already,” wrote the British novelist Geoff Nicholson in 2011. “The obscurity was part of the appeal.”
