Said William Plomer to his barber: “A little more off the back, please.”1 “That’s right, sir,” came the reply. “It wouldn’t do to have you looking like a poet.” Apocryphal? Possibly. Yet such drollery has the ring of prophecy. In a letter to John Lehmann in 1931, Plomer confessed, waggishly, that he had “never pretended to be a poet,” not even to himself. Ted Walker (who did look like a poet) observed that Plomer’s demeanor suggested not so much a writer as a magnanimous doctor. Walker was late to the party. As Plomer recalled it: “I have actually been congratulated [by a stranger] on my successful treatment of a difficult case of hydrocele” (the accumulation of serous fluid in the testes). Farce followed him like a guided missile.

“Plomer . . . is emphatically of the minority, i.e. of the section of writers, the real intelligentsia, the unconventional, critical-minded literary artists whom the British public in general don’t like, and therefore only buy in restricted quantities.” That was Edward Garnett in 1935. In 1972 several newspapers had tipped Plomer, like a horse, as the next Poet Laureate, a role Cecil Day-Lewis famously compared to being “put out to grass.” To Plomer’s relief, the post went to John Betjeman, who hated the job so much he considered resigning. The timing, in any event, was off: Plomer died in 1973, just three days before the publication of The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast, a cheerful,