R. F. Langley

Roger Langley was a poet and an inspiring teacher of English to generations of schoolchildren. He kept a journal in which his meditations on art and nature over 40 years fed an intense, late-flourishing body of verse.

After an entry made in the small hours of the night, jotting down Hamlet's observation that 'the rest is silence', the next thought recorded in Langley's Journals (Shearsman, 2006) is 'how every moment since had been, has been, filled with particulars'. It was a characteristic reflection for a writer whose work looks steadily down dizzying perspectives, to find the radiant detail that brings another life close. 'Nothing is less than / particular' ends the poem 'Experiment with a Hand Lens', a sentiment and a title that might apply to his lifelong scrutiny of brushstrokes and birdsong, insects and etymologies.

Roger Francis Langley was born in 1938 in Staffordshire and experienced the value of observant words and pictures early, through the illustrated letters that his schoolteacher father sent home from Africa during the Second World War. The eldest of three brothers, he shared a family passion for natural history. He attended Queen Mary's Grammar School in Walsall until 1957, when he won an open scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge.

His contemporary there and in the English tripos was the poet J. H. Prynne, with whom he formed a close friendship over their shared pleasure in poetry and art. Both were interested in the modernism of Ezra Pound's Cantos, and in their final year they were supervised by the poet and critic Donald Davie. Neither was yet writing poetry, but their tutor introduced them to formative books, including the verse of Charles Tomlinson and the art criticism of Adrian Stokes.

On graduation, Prynne and Langley followed Stokes and Pound to Italy, in an old Jowett Javelin van, to study Renaissance art. Returning to England, Langley began teaching at Shire Oak Grammar, Brownhills, Staffordshire, in 1961, moving to Wolverhampton Grammar in 1965, and then Bishop Vesey's Grammar, Sutton Coldfield, as head of English, in 1980. He taught art history as an extracurriculum enthusiasm, and invented creative writing classes for the junior years. His pupil and friend Nigel Wheale recalled that 'in a school full of wonderfully eccentric teachers, no one had ever seen anything like Roger'. Teaching the sixth form, his favourite occupation, Langley introduced students to the 'projective verse' of the American Charles Olson, which influenced his own writing.

Although a recipient of The English Intelligencer, the late-1960's Cambridge poetry newsletter in which Prynne and others were appearing, Langley remained cautious about his own, slowly accumulating work.

After a brief first marriage, he settled in the village of Shenstone with his second wife, Barbara, whom he met on the staff at Wolverhampton Grammar. During term, he put his energies into his job, marking homework with an impressive diligence. He wrote and painted on family holidays with friends in Suffolk. In 1970 he began his reflective journals, which he continued almost to his death, recording small moments of revelation.

In 1999 he retired with his wife to Bramfield, Suffolk. The local church holds a memorial statue of Elizabeth Coke (who died in childbirth in 1627), the subject of a poem ('The Ectasy Inventories') published in Langley's first collection, Hem (under the imprint Infernal Methods, 1978). Sidelong (1981) and Twelve Poems (1994) followed. The remarkable 'Jack' poems - a figure inspired by the dictionary columns under that word - appeared in two collections. When Carcanet published his Collected Poems (2000) he was short-listed for the Whitbread prize and enthusiastically reviewed.

In East Anglia he enjoyed the most productive decade of his writing life. The entirely original combination of irregular rhyme and syllabic metre in his later verse proved a spur to invention. The Face of It (2007) collected 21 new poems, which drew their 'bright bait' from landscapes, churches and galleries, at home and in Italy, as well as favourite philosophical reading. Langley enjoyed accepting invitations to read in public, and made a masterly recording for the Poetry Archive. Extracts from his journals became a regular feature in PN Review.

The affection and esteem in which he was held by fellow poets was shown by a festschrift on his 60th birthday.

He is survived by his wife Barbara and a son and daughter.