Clive Wilmer obituary

The Guardian

08-04-2025

Clive Wilmer, who has died from a stroke aged 80, was a poet and scholar best known for his advocacy of the work of the Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin and of the poet Thom Gunn. He taught for 25 years at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where in 2012 he was made an emeritus fellow in English literature.
Clive edited the Penguin Classics edition of Ruskin's Unto This Last and Other Writings (1985) and from 2009 was master of the Guild of St George, a national charity 'for arts, craft and the rural economy' founded by Ruskin in 1871. Clive built up the public awareness of Ruskin by launching engagement projects and exhibitions linked to the guild's Ruskin Collection in Sheffield and its property, Ruskin Land, in the Wyre Forest, Worcestershire.
Rachel Dickinson, who succeeded Clive as master of the Guild in 2019, said: 'Wilmer saw how John Ruskin's ideas could help make the world better.' The other great influence on Clive's life was the Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn. Clive first met Gunn in 1964 and they remained correspondents and friends until Gunn's death nearly 40 years later. They shared a belief in poetry's moral purpose – to tell the truth and to have the courage to do so.
Clive edited a selection of Gunn's essays, The Occasions of Poetry (1982), and in recent years, had been working on Gunn's legacy, editing an annotated Selected Poems (2018) and, with Michael Nott and August Kleinzahler, The Letters of Thom Gunn (2022). At the time of his death, he was preparing Gunn's Collected Essays.
He edited Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Selected Poems and Translations (1991), and William Morris's News from Nowhere and Other Writings (1993). His more contemporary political heroes were figures such as Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins, who, he felt, embodied Ruskinian values, fighting for the common good in public life. He once said to me that the current Conservative party was misnamed, because they conserve nothing.
Clive also championed the work of Ezra Pound, and his own poetry was influenced by Pound's notion of the poet as sculptor, working against the grain of language's resistances. He was the prime mover of the Pound centenary exhibition Pound's Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy, at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and the Tate Gallery in London in 1985, and organised conferences, symposia and colloquies, including, in 2011, one for the quatercentenary of the King James Bible.
For many years Clive worked as an EFL teacher and was, from 1989 to 1992, an interviewer for BBC Radio 3's Poet of the Month series. He wrote for many learned journals, notably the TLS and PN Review, and was also a translator, primarily of Hungarian poetry in collaboration with his fellow poet George Gömöri. Translations of poetry by György Petri, Miklós Radnóti and János Pilinszky showcased Clive's technical gifts and, in 2018, he received the Janus Pannonius prize for a lifetime's achievement in translation from Hungarian.
Born in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, Clive was the son of Eustace, a civil servant, and Sybil (nee Rogers). His father died when he was three, and Clive grew up with his mother and elder sister, Val, in Streatham, south London. One of his early heroes was Robin Hood. Tooting Bec Common, on his doorstep, was transformed in his imagination to Sherwood Forest. His acting skills developed at Emanuel school, Wandsworth, where, directed by an inspirational English teacher, Charles Cuddon, Clive played Brutus in Julius Caesar.
He won a scholarship to read English at King's College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1967. He joined Footlights and was later a member of the National Youth Theatre, playing Bottom alongside Helen Mirren in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But his vocation was poetry. A fellow poet, Michael Vince, recalls Clive James, already a budding journalist, chatting to them at the Footlights bar and admitting: 'I leave the poetry to you boys.'
Clive's first collection of poems, The Dwelling-Place, appeared in 1977. Of Earthly Paradise (1992), The Falls (2000) and The Mystery of Things (2008) are his most critically acclaimed collections. His final book, Architecture & Other Poems, will be published by Worple Press later this year.
Gunn praised Clive's writing for 'its unfaltering clarity … and its faithfulness to its subject matter'. The Falls, a 2000 poem about Niagara Falls, explores a theme central to all Clive's work: the search to find divine pattern in apparent randomness: 'immutable change / made and remade / laws finer than any known of men'.
Clive was generous and warm, a gentle giant of a man, with a great capacity for playfulness. A walk with him around Cambridge, his home for most of his adult life, was often an education in itself. Abroad, I recall him leading a group of us around Venice in the footsteps of his hero, Ruskin, and listening in awe.
Clive is survived by his partner, Dr Patricia Fara, by his children, Tamsin and Gabriel, from his marriage to Diane Redmond, which ended in divorce in 1984, his grandsons, Patrick and Oscar, and his sister, Val.
Clive Wilmer, poet and scholar, born 10 February 1945; died 13 March 2025