David Holbrook, who has died aged 88, was a great teacher and writer on education. He was also a poet, novelist, literary critic, anthologist and commentator on culture. A polemical writer of letters to newspapers, he waged an untiring campaign against nihilism in its many forms. His belief that human beings cannot live without a sense of meaning underlies all his work, but had its most practical effect in classrooms all over the English-speaking world.
Holbrook was born in Norwich, where his father was a railway clerk. Inspired by Nugent Monck, the innovative and eccentric director of the local Maddermarket theatre, the teenage Holbrook discovered Shakespeare's creativity on stage. Forty years on, he wrote a vivid commemoration of Monck in his novel A Play of Passion (1978).
In 1941 he went to Downing College, Cambridge, with a scholarship in English, but joined the army a year later. In 1944 he took part in the D-day landings, during which he was wounded. After further service in the Ardennes and Rhineland campaigns, he went back to Cambridge to complete his studies under FR Leavis.
Holbrook was too independent-minded to be a disciple and his relationship with Leavis was never easy. He probably owed as much to the forceful Marxist poet and critic Edgell Rickword. After Cambridge, Holbrook worked in London as assistant editor of Rickword's magazine Our Time. He then joined the Bureau of Current Affairs, where he helped produce pamphlets on political and cultural issues with colleagues including Leonard Woolf and Jacob Bronowski.
He became a teacher, of many kinds of pupils: adults in Workers' Educational Association classes in 1952-53; what were then called D-stream teenagers, in Bassingbourn village college, Cambridgeshire, from 1954 to 1961; and Cambridge undergraduates, at King's College (1961-65), Jesus (1968-70) and Downing (1973-75, 1981-88), where he was latterly director of studies in English and from 1989 an affable emeritus fellow.
Throughout his life Holbrook wrote energetically and produced more than 60 books, a couple of dozen of which appeared after his official retirement. His writing is intensely personal. His poems – published in five volumes, including Against the Cruel Frost (1963), and Object Relations (1967), as well as Selected Poems 1961-78 (1980) – are unashamedly autobiographical. They are frequently concerned with marriage and children, and with small domestic scenes.
His novels following the career of Paul Grimmer (the surname was his mother's maiden name) are derived even more directly from his own experiences. If family intimacies sometimes appear thinly disguised, the potential embarrassment can be accepted as part of the writer's unshakeable honesty. Flesh Wounds (1966) remains one of the finest pieces of imaginative writing to emerge about the second world war. The description of Paul sheltering from a mortar barrage while watching a green, jewel-like beetle move from clod to clod is unforgettable.
The importance of individual responses underpins his writing on education. Starting in 1961 with English for Maturity, which drew on his experiences at Bassingbourn, he published a series of books on English that many teachers found liberating. Rather than being put through a series of grammar and comprehension exercises based on inert extracts from dull authors, children were encouraged to explore the relationship between language and feeling, and, above all, to write for themselves. Later books – English for the Rejected (1964), The Exploring Word (1967), The Secret Places (1972), English for Meaning (1980), Education and Philosophical Anthropology (1987) – developed this theme.
They stemmed from his belief that "teaching poetry is at the centre of teaching English" because "poetry is language used for its deepest and most accurate purposes". Holbrook's approach was both inspiring and down-to-earth. No-nonsense lesson plans are set beside attentive accounts of children's own imaginative writing, suggestions for music to play in the class – Jelly Roll Morton and Leadbelly as well as Copland and Varèse – beside a ferociously comic assault on the "textbook myth", condemning the idea that work in English must be "quantitative and measurable".
Later books brought together different ways of understanding human behaviour and beliefs in an attempt to build a "philosophical anthropology". Holbrook drew on DW Winnicott's child psychotherapy and on phenomenological and existentialist thinkers to support his own intuitions. He recognised in culture not the Freudian sublimation of natural drives but a necessary part of our consciousness and the way we search for meaning. If the search is frustrated, substitutes will be found in drug-taking, aggressive fantasies, pornography and occultism, all available in a rapaciously commercial society. Where it is successful – in the exchanges between mother and baby as the foundation of the self's autonomy; in great art with its restorative power – the human world is recreated.
His books can be repetitive and over-discursive, but are nevertheless original. He provoked the supporters of literary figures including Dylan Thomas, CS Lewis and Sylvia Plath by diagnosing what he saw as their failure as writers. Other works are more celebratory. Gustav Mahler and the Courage to Be (1975) is a remarkable achievement, 100 pages of urgent reflection on the composer's life, works and psyche followed by 100 more of subtle analysis of the Ninth Symphony. This is all linked to commentary on 20th-century history and "the problem of death in art".
Holbrook's marriage to Margot Davies-Jones lasted more than 60 years and produced four children. Visitors were greeted with ebullient conversation and laughter – he was an excellent mimic – and offered home-grown vegetables and deliciously inventive meals. He continued painting and drawing until his death.
I experienced his generosity and humanity as a Cambridge undergraduate more than 40 years ago. His responses to my essays are models of their kind – pages of closely typed arguments, jokes, assertions, disagreements, suggestions and speculations with further hand-written footnotes in black ink, courteous and thoughtful contributions to the unending dialogue between generations. When I staged The Winter's Tale recently with 60 10-year-olds in Kilburn, north-west London, the girl in the hijab speaking Shakespeare's lines about "great creating nature" was part of that dialogue. It would not have happened without Holbrook's encouragement and example.
He is survived by Margot, his daughters, Suki and Kate, his sons, Jon and Tom, and by nine grandchildren.
Andy Hamilton writes: In 1973 I was working on a campsite in France while waiting to begin a course in English at Downing College, Cambridge, where David Holbrook was director of studies. Two English girls arrived and told me that they knew of David and that he was a "narrow-minded prude", adding that the newspapers had dubbed him "the thinking man's Mary Whitehouse".
The man I met a few months later was the polar opposite of narrow-minded. He had an expansive intellect and was intensely curious about every imaginable aspect of culture and humanity.
David's main theme at the time was the social damage caused by elements of popular culture that he felt were dehumanising, such as the commodification of sex, the objectification of women and the commercial stylisations of violence. At the time, he was often portrayed as something of a dinosaur. But now his views seem all too prescient. He was ahead of his time, not behind it.
I greatly enjoyed his supervisions, and I can picture him now, crackling with energy and peering over his glasses, with a kindly, mischievous twinkle in his eye as he made some excited connection between something someone had just said and a particular sentence in a novel by DH Lawrence, via the works of Mahler.
• David Kenneth Holbrook, teacher, writer, poet and critic, born 9 January 1923; died 11 August 2011
• The article was amended on 5 September 2011. The original said that Holbrook produced a couple of books after his retirement, rather than a couple of dozen. This has been corrected.
