John Riley (poet)

John Riley (* 1937 in Leeds ; † October 27 or October 28, 1978 ) was a British poet who is assigned to the British Poetry Revival ( English "revival of British poetry").

Riley was born and raised in Leeds. He served in the Royal Air Force from 1956 to 1958 and then attended Pembroke College in Cambridge . There he graduated in 1961 and then worked as a teacher in various schools in the Cambridge area. During this time he met many poets and poets from the “ Cambridge Group ”, the nucleus of the British Poetry Revival.

In 1969 he took a job as a teacher near Oxford . In that year he founded the “Grosseteste Press” with his friend Tim Longville and two years later, in 1971, the two published the magazine “Grosseteste Review”. Riley had retired from teaching as early as 1970 to return to Leeds and devote all of his manpower to writing. In 1977 he joined the Orthodox Church . On the night of October 27-28, 1978, he was murdered near his home.

His works were influenced by Charles Olson and Ossip Emiljewitsch Mandelstam , whose works he translated into English. His first book, Ancient and Modern , was published in 1967 and, in 1980, after his death, The Collected Works . In the latter, his long poem Czargrad, which is important for poetry, is printed in full for the first time. In 1995 Carcanet Press published “A selected Poems”.