William Cookson was a British poet, writer on poetry and literary editor, best-known for his influential poetry magazine Agenda

Agenda (poetry journal)

Agenda is a literary journal published in London and founded by William Cookson. Agenda Editions is an imprint of the journal operating as a small press.-History and editorial orientation:...

.

He was brought up in Surrey

Surrey

Surrey is a county in the South East of England and is one of the Home Counties. The county borders Greater London, Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire. The historic county town is Guildford. Surrey County Council sits at Kingston upon Thames, although this has been part of...

 and London, and educated at Westminster School

Westminster School

The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, almost always known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college in Britain...

 and New College, Oxford

New College, Oxford

New College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.- Overview :The College's official name, College of St Mary, is the same as that of the older Oriel College; hence, it has been referred to as the "New College of St Mary", and is now almost always...

. Aged 16, he travelled to Italy to meet Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, and he was still a teenager when he launched Agenda in the late 1950s.

On Cookson's death a "Celebratory Issue" of Agenda (Vol. 39, No. 4 (2003)) was published in which his successor as editor of the journal, Patricia McCarthy, described him as "a man who sacrificed his life for poetry and was perhaps the best, most single-minded editor of our day". In addition to a final redaction of "Vestiges and Versions", the issue contains biographical sketches by Edmund Gray and Martin Dodsworth.

Selected publications

(As critic)

• A Guide to The Cantos
  The Cantos
  The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...
  
   of Ezra Pound
  Ezra Pound
  Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
  
  (1985; Revised Edition, 2001)
• (Note: An Introduction to David Jones was announced but not seemingly published.)

(As editor)

• Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909-1965 (Faber, 1973)
• Agenda - An Anthology 1959-1993 (Carcanet Press, 1994)

(As poet)

• Dream Traces (Hippopotamus Press, 1975)
• Spell (Agenda Editions, 1986)
• Vestiges (Agenda Editions/Big Little Poems, 1987)
• Vestiges & Versions 1955-1996 (Agenda Editions/Poet and Painters Press, 1997)