Gordon Wharton

Who is Gordon Wharton?

Gordon Wharton, died 2 December 2011 was a British poet.

He left school aged 14 and said that anything he learned afterwards 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.

He listed among the prime influences on his work Dylan Thomas, Andrew Marvell and 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. 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; in fact 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 and Errors of Observation.