Vernon Finley

Notes for a piece on the poet and social philosopher Vernon Finlay.

Today, no one I'm acquainted with knows the poetry of Vernon Finlay. All his poetry books are out of print and what there is circulating on the Internet now seems stale by comparison with his 'Group' contemporaries. On the other hand, Keeping Still and The Origin of Movement, the two books he wrote in the early seventies in collaboration with the social critic Edward Blunt are still very influential among...

Who was Vernon Finbar Finlay?

In a recent memoir the painter Sara Spapo, who for a time in the early sixties fell under his spell, remembers him as ‘the most perplexing person i had ever known; everything about him from beginning to end was odd; no one can imagine how strange that fellow was, and while it's true he exerted a fascination I had never experienced with any other person no one realised better than myself he was at heart a fraudulent person. I first came across him in the national gallery. He was dozing in a chair beside Whistler’s mother. Taking him for an attendant...


In any obituary, tradition requires it to proceed in the prescribed order of beginning, middle and end, or birth, work, death. It’s a sensible convention and from the reader’s perspective the least the author can do for his investment of time and money. However, for the sake of.... I intend to start around the late sixties.

Finlay’s Ghost/

Hang on jug ears, that makes no sense whatsoever; let me as follows refresh your memory; from 'Keeping Still’ chapter 4: Verisimilitude, and how to achieve it.

‘The centrifugal forces attracting the blood to a body’s circumference act as well upon the brain, such that one perceives its increased weight but only relative to a world spinning out of control’