RF Langley The poet and diarist RF Langley, whose meditative work was deeply influenced by the natural world and by the landscapes of Suffolk in particular, has died.Born in 1938 and educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, Langley was a late bloomer, only beginning to publish poetry seriously after his retirement from work as an art history teacher in 1999. Thereafter his work appeared sparingly in pamphlets, journals and anthologies, including The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (1999).Langley published two of his own collections: his Collected Poems, out in 2000, was shortlisted for that year's Whitbread prize for poetry, while a later volume, The Face of It (2007), was described by poet and academic Jeremy Noel-Tod as "one of the classics of early 21st-century English poetry".A friend and contemporary of poet JH Prynne, Langley was considered part of the "Cambridge School", whose members adopted a cooler, more measured tone than their contemporaries. His publisher Carcanet describes him as "one of our most original authors ... curious and experimental in spirit", with elements of both high modernism and English pastoral. His work echoed the Romantics, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, and particularly Shakespeare, with Langley once writing: "A Midsummer Night's Dream might still be the answer to everything."Critics noted his "particularly English nostalgia and sense of loss", while observing that his strictly formulated poetry, which employed compression, ellipsis and sometimes complex ideas, could make his work difficult on first reading.The writer kept a journal throughout his life, its themes often intertwining with those of his poetry. In recent years the diary was regularly extracted in the literary journal PN Review, and it was published as Journals by Shearsman Books in 2006.
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