Poetic Obituaries: The poet and critic Derek Stanford,

who has died aged 90, had reasons to be grateful to the novelist Muriel Spark, his one-time lover, but her characterisation of him as the fifth-rate, pushy writer Hector Bartlett in A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) was not among them. Nor were her pronouncements on his 1963 work, Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study. "If Mr Stanford had applied to me," she wrote, "I would have advised against this undertaking."

But, 50 years after they parted, his poems seemingly inspired by the affair appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) for several years, conjuring up too the doomed 1890s poets he identified with and championed.

from The Guardian: Derek Stanford

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