Dates

• Existence: 1932 - 2003

Biography

Peter Redgrove was born January 2, 1932, and was educated at Taunton School and Queens' College Cambridge, where he was a founder-member of "The Group", an association of poets originating in Cambridge in 1952 which lasted as a formal grouping into the 1960s. From 1954 to 1961 he worked as a scientific journalist and editor, receiving in 1961 a Fulbright Award as Visiting Poet to Buffalo University, N.Y. From 1962 to 1965 he was Gregory Fellow in Poetry at Leeds University, from 1966 to 1983 Resident Author and Senior Lecturer in Complementary Studies, Falmouth School of Art, and from 1974 to 1975 O'Connor Professor of Literature at Colgate University, N.Y. After that he worked as a free-lance writer and broadcaster. As well as the poetry for which he is best known, Redgrove wrote plays (several of which have been broadcast), and novels. His work won him many literary prizes and awards, including the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1996.

Redgrove trained as a Jungian analyst, and regarded creative, psychological and scientific work as aspects of the same continuum, and the creative process itself as evolutionary. Dreams and the unconscious were viewed as essential features of human existence. His chief interest, and the theme of his work, was the way in which a creative and imaginative response can be the natural and life-giving reaction to everyday existence. One example of the psychological element in his creative work is The Wise Wound, a study of the significant but "rejected" menstrual element of the human fertility cycle, written, as have been other works, in collaboration with his wife and partner Penelope Shuttle, a creative author in her own right. Peter Redgrove died in June 2003.

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