Martin Bell (1918-1978) was a British poet. He served from 1939 to 1946 with the Royal Engineers in Lebanon, Syria and Italy.

Bell was strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot and Jules Laforgue. He used complex ironies and was skilled at deflating by rhetorical devices. However, he was far from being a right-wing satirist.

His style came to maturity in the late 1950s. This relatively late development shows in the depth of experience manifest in his best poems.

His best-known poems are The Enormous Comics and Letter to a Friend.

Born in Hampshire in 1918, Martin Bell was the leading member of the 'lost generation' of English poets whose careers were interrupted by the War. He was a prominent member of The Group during the fifties, and a major influence on younger poets like Peter Redgrove and Peter Porter.

His poetry reached a wide audience during the sixties through Penguin Modern Poets, and in 1967 he published his Collected Poems,1937-1966, his first and last book. Bell was also a champion and brilliant translator of French Surrealist poets. He died in poverty in Leeds in 1978.

Like other 'provincial' working-class contemporaries, Bell wrote fantastical, highly erudite, biting, belligerent poetry. And yet - as Philip Hobsbaum said - he also wrote 'some of the most delicate love poems of our time' as well as 'one of the major war poems in the language'.

A. Alvarez called him 'an emotional tightrope walker . . . He writes a rather bitter, tensely colloquial verse based, it seems, on a radical dislike for both himself and pretty much everything else.'

'The publication of Martin Bell's Collected Poems is as important a literary event as any not merely this year but in this decade.' - Anthony Burgess.

'Martin Bell is one of the major poets writing in English in the second half of the century' - Peter Porter