Jon Silkin was a British poet.

Early life

Jon Silkin was born in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, in a Jewish immigrant family and named after Jon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga

The Forsyte Saga

The Forsyte Saga is a series of three novels and two interludes published between 1906 and 1921 by John Galsworthy. They chronicle the vicissitudes of the leading members of an upper-middle-class British family, similar to Galsworthy's own...

, and attended Wycliffe College

Wycliffe College (Gloucestershire)

Wycliffe College is a co-educational independent school located in the town of Stonehouse in Gloucestershire, in the West of England. The school was founded in 1882 by GW Sibly, and comprises a Nursery School for ages 2 – 4, a Preparatory School for ages 4 – 13, and a Senior School catering for...

 and Dulwich College

Dulwich College

Dulwich College is an independent school for boys in Dulwich, southeast London, England. The college was founded in 1619 by Edward Alleyn, a successful Elizabethan actor, with the original purpose of educating 12 poor scholars as the foundation of "God's Gift". It currently has about 1,600 boys,...

 During the Second World War he was one of the children evacuated from London (in his case, to Wales); he remembered that he "roamed the countryside incessantly" while in Wales, collecting "fool's gold" and exploring old Roman mines. For a period of about six years in the 1950s, after National Service

National service

National service is a common name for mandatory government service programmes . The term became common British usage during and for some years following the Second World War. Many young people spent one or more years in such programmes...

, he supported himself by manual labour and other menial jobs. By 1956 he rented the top-floor flat at 10, Compayne Gardens, Hampstead, the house of Bernice Rubens, who later won the Booker Prize, and her husband Rudolph Nassauer, also a published novelist, later. Silkin, in turn, sublet rooms to, among others, David Mercer, later a prolific TV and West End dramatist, and Malcolm Ross-Macdonald, then a diploma student at the Slade and later a novelist; his first novel, The Big Waves (Cape, 1962) is a roman à clef

Roman à clef

Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...

 of life in that flat, in which Silkin features as Somes Arenstein. All three men lived by teaching English as a Foreign Language at the St Giles School of English in Oxford Street.

Poetry

He wrote a number of works on the war poetry of World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. He was known also as editor of the literary magazine Stand, which he founded in 1952, and which he continued to edit (with a hiatus from 1957 to 1960) until his death.

His first poetry collection, The Peaceable Kingdom was published in 1954. This was followed by several more. The Lens Breakers was published by Sinclair Stevenson in 1992. He edited several anthologies and books of criticism, most notably on the poets of the First World War. He lectured and taught widely, both in Britain and abroad (in among other places the USA, Israel, and Japan).

He began an association with the University of Leeds

University of Leeds

The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...

 in 1958, when he was awarded, as a mature student, a two-year Gregory Fellowship, and the archives of "Stand" are now at the university. He moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1965, where he lived until his death.

He was working with Cargo Press on his collection Testament Without Breath at the time of his death in November 1997.

Works

• The Portrait and Other Poems (1950)
• The Peaceable Kingdom (1954)
• The Two Freedoms (1958)
• New Poems 1960 (1960) editor with Anthony Cronin
  Anthony Cronin
  Anthony Cronin is an Irish poet. He received the Marten Toonder Award for his contribution to Irish literature....
  
   and Terence Tiller
  Terence Tiller
  Terence Rogers Tiller was an English poet and radio producer.-Early life:He was born in Truro, Cornwall. His early career was in medieval history at the University of Cambridge. During the World War II he taught in Cairo.-BBC:In 1946 he joined the BBC; and was a known Fitzrovian...
  
  
• Living Voices (1960)
• The Re-Ordering f the Stones (1961)
• Flash Point An Anthology Of Modern Poetry1964)intro only

'Flower Poems (1964) second edition 1978

• Penguin Modern Poets 7 (1965) with Richard Murphy
  Richard Murphy (poet)
  Richard Murphy is an Irish poet. He is a member of Aosdána and currently lives in Sri Lanka.-Early years:Murphy was born to an Anglo-Irish family at Milford House, near the Mayo-Galway border, in 1927...
  
   and Nathaniel Tarn
  Nathaniel Tarn
  Nathaniel Tarn is an American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator. He was born to a French mother and a British father. He lived in Paris until age 7, then in Belgium until age 11.-Education:...
  
  
• Nature with Man (1965)
• Poems New And Selected (1966)
• New and Selected Poems (1966)
• Against Parting by Natan Zach (c. 1967) translator from Hebrew
• Three Poems (1969)
• Poems (1969) editor with Vernon Scannell
  Vernon Scannell
  Vernon Scannell was a British poet and author. He was at one time a professional boxer, and wrote novels about the sport.-Personal life:Vernon Scannell was born in 1922 in Spilsby, Lincolnshire...
  
  
• Pergamon Poets VIII (1970) editor with Vernon Scannell
  Vernon Scannell
  Vernon Scannell was a British poet and author. He was at one time a professional boxer, and wrote novels about the sport.-Personal life:Vernon Scannell was born in 1922 in Spilsby, Lincolnshire...
  
  
• Amana Grass (1971)
• Killhope Wheel (1971)
• Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War (1972)
• Air That Pricks the Earth (1973)
• Poetry of the Committed Individual: A "Stand" Anthology of Poetry (1973) editor
• The Principle of Water (1974)
• A 'Jarapiri' Poem (1975)
• The Peaceable Kingdom (1975)
• Two Images of Continuing Trouble (19760
• The Little Time-Keeper (1976)
• Jerusalem (1977)
• Into Praising (1978)
• Out of Battle, the Poetry of the Great War (1978)
• The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (1979) editor
• New Poetry 5: An Arts Council Anthology (1979) editor with Peter Redgrove
  Peter Redgrove
  Peter William Redgrove was a prolific and widely respected British poet, who also wrote works with his second wife Penelope Shuttle on menstruation and women's health, novels and plays.-Life:...
  
  
• The Lapidary Poems (1979)
• Selected Poems (1980)
• The Psalms and their Spoils (1980)
• Autobiographical Stanzas: 'Someone's Narrative' (1983)
• Footsteps on a Downcast Path (1984)
• Gurney: A Play (1985)
• The Ship's Pasture (1986)
• Selected Poems (1980) new edition
• The Penguin Book of First World War Prose (1989) editor with Jon Glover
  Jon Glover
  Jon Glover is a British actor. He has appeared in various television programmes including Play School, Survivors, the Management consultant in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Casualty, Bodger and Badger and Peak Practice....
  
  
• The Lens-Breakers (1992)
• Selected Poems (1993)
• Wilfred Owen: The War Poems (1994) editor
• Watersmeet (1994)
• The Life of Metrical & Free Verse in Twentieth-Century Poetry (1997)
• Testament Without Breath (1998)
• Making a Republic (2002)

Poetry of the Committed Individual (1973)

A Stand anthology, edited by Silkin. The poets included were:

Dannie Abse

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