Gordon Wharton



Gordon Wharton (born 1929) is a English poet.

Life
Wharton was born in in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. He left school aged 14 and says that anything he knows now was self-taught. He started publishing poems from the age of about 21 and he became co-editor of the now-defunct literary magazine Chanticleer with the Irish poet, Patrick Galvin, at around the same time. Shortly afterwards he started reviewing regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, mainly dealing with modern and 17th-century poetry.

Meanwhile, in his more prosaic working life, he graduated from carpentry, via work on a travelling fair and a period dealing in antiques, to travel journalism: he was founder-editor of the weekly Travelnews, a newspaper serving the travel industry.

He published two small collections of verse in the mid to late 1950s: This and That (Fantasy Press 1955) and Errors of Observation (The School of Art, University of Reading 1957).

He has started submitting poetry for publication again after a break of some 30 years. He has been published more recently in literary magazines such as Ambit, London Magazine',' and The Rialto''. He now has sufficient poems to make a third selection, the working title of which is "Towards Oblivion."

Writing
He numbers among the prime influences on his work Dylan Thomas, Andrew Marvell, and ("inevitably") W.H. Auden. More recently, as may be evident from some of his later poems, the more economical style of Ian Hamilton has been an influence.