Heath-Stubbs was born in
Streatham, London. The family later lived in
Hampstead. His parents were Francis Heath-Stubbs, a non-practising, independently wealthy solicitor, and his wife Edith Louise Sara, a concert pianist under her maiden name, Edie Marr. His boyhood was largely spent near the
New Forest. The Stubbs family were
gentry from Staffordshire; Heath-Stubbs's great-great-grandfather Joseph, a younger son, married Mary, the only child of a judge named Heath, this eventually becoming part of the family name. Heath-Stubbs stated in his autobiography
Hindsights (1993), "In my grandfather's day, the last of the Heaths made us Stubbses her heirs, so long as we changed our name to Heath-Stubbs." Furthermore, "according to family tradition", they were related to the pamphleteer
John Stubbs, who was sentenced to the loss of his right hand by
Queen Elizabeth I for his opposition to negotiations for her marriage to
Francis, Duke of Anjou, and yet remained a staunch royalist. "Family pride, combining with a poised self-irony" marked Heath-Stubbs's poem
Epitaph, beginning, "Mr Heath-Stubbs as you must understand/Came of a gentleman's family out of Staffordshire/Of as good blood as any in England/But he was wall-eyed and his legs too spare." Heath-Stubbs was educated at
Bembridge School on the
Isle of Wight and at the age of 21 entered
Queen's College, Oxford, where he read English, finding the lectures of
Nevill Coghill and
C. S. Lewis particularly rewarding. He became a poetry adviser to the firm of
Routledge, co-editing
Eight Oxford Poets in 1941, with
Sidney Keyes and Michael Meyer, Although diagnosed with glaucoma at the age of 18, a condition he inherited from his father, he was able to read with his left eye until 1961, but was completely blind from 1978. Nonetheless, he continued to write almost to the end. A documentary film about him, entitled
Ibycus: A Poem by John Heath-Stubbs, was made by the
Chilean director Carlos Klein in 1997. John Heath-Stubbs died in London on 26 December 2006, aged 88. ==Writing style==