Peter Jones was an unacknowledged presence in many poetry lovers’ libraries. He edited the Penguin collection Imagist Poetry, first published in 1972 and still in print, since 2001 as a Penguin Modern Classic. It also exists in Chinese translation.
Peter, who has died aged 96, also played key roles in the magazine PN Review and in Carcanet Press, the literary publishers we founded at Pin Farm, South Hinksey, Oxford, in 1969. Peter shared “the labour and the risks”, Mark Fisher wrote in Letters to an Editor (1989) – he surrendered his teacher’s pension to help finance the projects. Apart from Imagist Poetry, he wrote Fifty American Poets (1980); some of the 50 writers he chose challenged the English reader. We published them.
Peter had previously been a well-loved English teacher at Christ’s Hospital school in West Sussex, known for his theatre productions. Roger Allam began acting under Peter’s aegis. John Pine wrote that Peter “started my acting career by casting me as Androcles and Shylock when nobody else thought I could do it”. I first met Peter as my house master when I was an exchange student from Mexico.
He was born and raised in Walsall, Staffordshire, the son of Elsie (nee MacFarlane) and Austin Jones. He watched from his bedroom window the glow from the bombing of Coventry in 1940. After national service in the RAF (1947-49) he went to Keble College, Oxford, to study English on a scholarship.
At Keble he met the future poet Geoffrey Hill, another scholarship boy. Peter’s father was a colliery accountant, Hill’s a local policeman. Neither of them shed a sense of not belonging at Oxford. Their friendship, Peter’s widow Alison Elizabeth Lister said, “grew out of that shared displacement and lasted a lifetime”. At Keble they were nicknamed Tweedledum and Tweedledee. “During our marriage,” Alison recalls, “their weekly telephone calls were sacrosanct and could last for hours” – until Hill’s death in 2016.
Peter’s editorial contribution to PN Review and Carcanet was in the area of American poetry. He developed an enthusiasm for Hilda Doolittle, who published as “HD” and introduced her Tribute to Freud (1971). He brought on board her collections Trilogy and Hermetic Definition (our favourite rediscovery) and the Collected Poems. Our last editorial collaboration was the critical anthology British Poetry Since 1970, published in 1980.
Peter married Alison in 1984. Their son, Laurence, was born severely disabled in 1985. The family moved to Elston, Nottinghamshire, in 1991. At the age of 74, Peter received a second first-class degree in English from Nottingham University, trying “to stave off boredom”. His last home was in the village of Cropwell Butler, where Peter managed “amazingly well”, says Alison, until close to the end of his life.
He is survived by Alison and Laurence.
