John Gawsworth (June 29 1912 - September 23 1970), a pseudonym of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, was a British writer, poet and compiler of anthologies, both of poetry and of short stories. He also used the pseudonym Orpheus Scrannel (alludes to Milton's Lycidas).

As a very young man he moved in London literary circles. He ran the Twyn Barlwm Press, a small press publishing some well-known poets. He was a friend of both Edgar Jepson and M. P. Shiel, whose literary executor he would later become. He gave Hugh MacDiarmid a roof over his head in London in 1934 (MacDiarmid returned the compliment in When the Rat-Race Is Over; an essay in honour of the fiftieth birthday of John Gawsworth (1962)). At this time he was very much involved in compiling story collections, generally of the fiction of the supernatural. Poetry collections of this time were Lyrics to Kingcup (1932), Mishka and Madeleine. A Poem Sequence for Marcia (1932), Poems 1930-1932 (1936), New Poems 1939. Later he published through the Richards Press.

He met and befriended the young Lawrence Durrell in 1932, when he was living in Denmark Street ; he made friends as well as enemies (Dylan Thomas, George Woodcock) throughout literary London.

He made a more serious name for himself in Cairo during World War II, returning to a picturesque eccentricity as a Fitzrovian. His Collected Poems appeared in 1949. A later volume is Toreros (1990).

The Known Signatures anthology (reactionary, quite literally) was prompted by the Michael Roberts New Country collection. The Edwardian Poetry Book One (1936) (edited anonymously) and Neo-Georgian Poetry 1936-1937 are extraordinary for their retrospective vision.

Poets in Known Signatures (1932)

Edmund Blunden - A. E. Coppard - W. H. Davies - Lord Alfred Douglas - Ernest Dowson - John Drinkwater - John Freeman - John Gawsworth - Wilfred Gibson - John Gray - Lionel Johnson - Hugh MacDiarmid - Richard Middleton - Harold Monro - Herbert Palmer - Edith Sitwell - L. A. G. Strong - Edward Thomas - Theodore Wratislaw

Poets in Edwardian Poets (1936)

Roy Campbell - Frederick Carter - Wilfred Rowland Childe - Frank Eyre - John Gawsworth - Michael Juste - Hugh MacDiarmid - Hamish MacLaren - Mary Francis McHugh - R. L. Mégroz - E. H. W. Meyerstein - Herbert Palmer - Ruth Pitter - Tristram Rainey - A. S. J. Tessimond - E. H. Visiak - Anna Wickham

External links

• The Lyric Struggles of John Gawsworth (http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/bai/eng.htm)
• At Supernatural Fiction Database, story anthologies (http://homepages.pavilion.co.uk/users/tartarus/g6.htm)