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Peter Russell was one of those people one felt privileged – and occasionally irritated! – to have known. He was a remarkable man; remarkable for the range (and depth) of his learning, for his retention through a long life of an almost childlike curiosity and desire to learn(one was never likely to hear Peter dismiss anything as boring or without interest), for the passionate absoluteness of his commitment to poetry and his vision of it as one of the central human activities. Always an emotional man, one might say of him what William Drummond of Hawthornden said of Ben Jonson, that he was a man “passionately kind and angry, careless either to gain or keep”.

   Peter’s work as a poet was both very various in manner and uneven in achievement. Peter was not especially well-endowed with the power to judge his own work, and he too often published work that was inferior. At his (frequent) best, however, he was capable of work of a very high order. He wrote a number of profound and musical lyrics, in a manner that owed much to Yeats. Some of the best were collected in The Golden Chain (Venice, 1970). He was one of the modern masters of the sonnet; some of the best are collected in Towards An Unknown Life (Seattle, 1997). He continued to write sonnets until blindness and illness stopped him; many remain unpublished and uncollected; in those of the last decade he created a moving record of the physical and spiritual experiences of his old age. Other important lyrics are collected in Teorie e altre liriche (Rome, 1990), all the poems in which employ the quatrain. The extended lyrics and contemplative poems in Elemental Discourses (Salzburg, 1981) he described (in the long and fascinating introduction) as attempts to produce “sacred spaces cut out of the chaos of the profane consciousness”; the best of these poems seem to speak out of their author’s belief, expressed in a lecture delivered in 1996, that “poetry, in its sublimest conception is the language of the Spirit”.

   A more obviously ‘modernist’ side to Russell’s achievement(though the adjective wouldn’t be appropriate in any very simple fashion) lay in his ‘translations’ of the late Roman poet Quintilius. In The Elegies of Quintilius (revised edition, London 1996) and From The Apocalypse of Quintilius (Salzburg, 1997) Russell ‘translates’ the work of a nomadic Latin poet in search of Truth and Beauty, of knowledge of God and the ideal woman. The first printings of the Elegies came garlanded with spurious busts and biographies of Quintilius and the mischievous humour involved in the whole exercise was very much part of Peter’s nature. Signing a copy of The Elegies for me, he inscribed himself as “Quintilius’s elf ”. But the humour was only part of the complex Quintilian mixture. Scholars and scholarship were parodied, modern poets were teased. But profound religious questions were touched on too, perceptions about the network of connections linking different ages and cultures were articulated in poetry that was at times densely allusive and at others (indeed, sometimes simultaneously!) startlingly simple. The Quintilius poems, which Russell never collected and organised systematically) effect a fusion of wit and scholarship, of sheer cheek and philosophical seriousness, of knockabout humour and spiritual vision that is unlike anything else in modern English poetry. In them Russell extends the idea of the poetic persona and the dramatic monologue in ways unmatched by any of his contemporaries. Through Quintilius, Russell is able to write of one age of cultural decline and confusion (the fifth century A.D.) and, in doing so, to offer ironic commentary on another – our own.

    Born in Bristol in September of 1921, Russell was educated at Malvern College and won a place to read natural sciences at King’s College, Cambridge. He chose not to take it up. In 1939 he volunteered for the Royal Artillery and, after serving as an Intelligence Officer, achieved the rank of major before the end of the war. Post-war he enrolled to study English at Queen Mary College, London; he left without taking a degree and once explained this by telling me that he feared that with a degree he might have become an academic! In 1947 he made his first visit to Italy, later to become his home. From 1949 to 1956 he was the driving force behind the remarkable periodical Nine: A Magazine of Literature and the Arts, which published work by, amongst many others, Pound, Borges, Roy Campbell, Marianne Moore, Eliot and Graves. From 1951 to 1956 he published books by Pound, Edwin Morgan, Tom Scott and others under the imprint of the Pound Press. He edited a volume of critical essays, published in 1950, on the occasion of Pound’s sixty-fifth birthday, with a very distinguished list of contributors. He was busy in the campaign for Pound’s release. From 1951 to 1963 Russell ran bookshops in Kent and London. Not a gifted businessman, he was declared bankrupt in 1963. He moved to Berlin, and was never to live in Britain again. In 1965 he moved to Venice; there followed spells in the U.S.A, Yugoslavia and Canada. In 1977 he moved to Tehran, to the prestigious Imperial Academy of Philosophy, where his colleagues included Henri Corbin and Tosohiku Izutsu. The Iranian Revolution forced his return to Venice – and the abandonment of the valuable library he had assembled in Iran.

   In 1983 he moved to ‘La Turbina’, a remote former water-mill at the bottom of a steep-sided valley in the beautiful mountains of the Pratomagno, between Florence and Arezzo. There he lived, often almost without money (though he usually managed to maintain his supply of books, whisky and cigarettes) in very primitive circumstances. The house contained almost no chairs but was full to overflowing with books in a many languages on many different subjects. Peter effectively lived in the small kitchen, the only part of the house that was adequately heated, sitting at the tiny table with books spread out, whisky and cigarettes to hand. Long evenings of conversation with him in the kitchen were likely to range from the poetic advantages of the Arabic language to the morality of Italian politicians, from Vivaldi to edible mushrooms, from Thomas Taylor’s Platonism to memories of his conversations with Ezra Pound. For some of his years at La Turbina he benefited greatly from the assistance of his son Peter George. In 1984 the publication of All for the Wolves (Anvil Press) attracted a good deal of praise (including an excellent review in The Times), though Peter had little interest in the London literary world. In 1990 a fire at La Turbina destroyed many books and papers, including letters from the literary figures Russell had known. Only two years later the house was inundated in a sudden flood. Russell endured all these disasters with great resilience of spirit. He won many readers and admirers in Italy and his work was awarded several prizes. In the last years of his life, ill health forced him into the care of a Residential Home in the small town of Castelfranco di Sopra. The local authority of Pian di Sco is to establish a research centre built around Russell’s library and archive.

   Though praised by readers as diverse as Hugh MacDiarmid and Dana Gioia, Russell’s work has not, outside Italy, attracted the attention it deserves. The sheer bulk of his published output (and the presence amongst it of too much that doesn’t show him at his best) and the fact that much of it has been published outside Britain perhaps offer explanations (excuses?) of a sort. Yet, if readers and historians want to know what happened to the influences of Yeats and Pound, want to understand how genuinely learned poetry could be written accessibly in the twentieth century, how serious ideals could be kept alive in an age of trivia (and kept alive alongside an innate sense of fun) then Russell’s work is one of the places they must look. With his death the chain that links us to the past has lost an important link. His friends will miss him greatly.

   Peter Russell died on January 22nd, 2003 in San Giovanni Valdarno, midway between Florence and Arezzo. He is buried by the Romanesque church of Santa Maria in the village of Pian di Sco.