Terence Rogers Tiller

Tiller, Terence Rogers (1916–1987), poet and radio producer, was born in Comprigney Cottage, Truro, Cornwall, on 19 September 1916, the son of George Henry Rogers Tiller, a clerk working for the Territorial Army, and his wife, Catherine Mary, née Stoot. He was educated at the Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, London, and in 1934 went to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read history and in 1936 won the chancellor's medal for English verse. He acted as director of studies at Jesus until 1939, when he went to Cairo to teach English literature and history at Fuad I University. During the Second World War he became closely associated with the group surrounding Personal Landscape, a review in the Middle East that had been founded and was edited by Lawrence Durrell, Robin Fedden, and Bernard Spencer. In 1945 he married Doreen Hugh, née Watson, and they had two children.

Tiller published six volumes of poetry, beginning with Poems (1941), in which Virginia Woolf, who had read it in manuscript, found 'music and imagination … rare for a first book'. This was followed by The Inward Animal (1943), and Unarm, Eros (1947). Much of the verse found in these volumes deals with the condition of a poet-in-exile, and charts Tiller's slow coming to terms 'with the seediness of the Egyptian scene'. In this alien land, his 'customary self', by which he meant that of the aloof intellectual, was put under siege, and his final reaction to the Sphinx in a poem bearing that name was: 'we cannot gaze him down.' Occasionally, a surrealist image would appear in his early work—'a camel in a bath', for instance.

After Tiller's third book had come out there were no further references in his poetry to oases, Coptic churches, or giving lectures to the troops in Tripoli. Nevertheless, it was these poems, with their Middle Eastern setting, which proved his most popular; they were frequently reprinted in anthologies about the Second World War. In his three subsequent books—Reading a Medal (1957), Notes for a Myth (1968), and That Singing Mesh (1979)—he indulged in speculations about Adam and the fall of man, Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and the influence of the planets upon mankind. There was a strong metaphysical strain throughout his work (he also translated and edited John Gower's Confessio amantis, 1963), and, as he acknowledged, he was indebted to his reading of Dante and Rilke. However, despite the fact that Tiller declared these later poems to be love poems, readers found them difficult and sometimes obscure; for instance, the opening title poem of Reading a Medal breaks off with the word ‘because’ in mid-line.

If Tiller's readership shrank, as a successful radio producer he gained a wide audience of enthusiastic listeners. He had joined the BBC features department in 1946, and consequently belonged to the golden period of the Third Programme. His acclaimed radio programmes included adaptations of Chaucer's Parlement of Foules in 1958, of Dante's Inferno in 1966, and of The Vision of Piers Ploughman (broadcast 1980, published 1981). He also produced several features on modern poets, including Durrell and Spencer.

In manner Tiller was precise and punctilious, and did not always carry his learning lightly. He was a formidable chess player, and an authority on astronomy and astrology. He kept regular drinking hours, went daily at twelve sharp to the BBC club bar, and sat in the same chair. He was shy and secretive but, like many shy men, could be bold when the occasion called for it. His two daughters held him somewhat in awe, but generally speaking theirs was a loving family.

Tiller retired from the BBC in 1975, and died at Queen Mary's University Hospital, Roehampton, London, on 24 December 1987, the eve of a feast day which he had at several times celebrated with nativity poems. His earliest, called 'The Birth of Christ', closed with this line: 'And over his thin cry, the noise of angels.' His wife survived him.