He worked as a gardener, a school teacher, an actor, a newspaper reporter, and a script writer. He was the grandson of General Sir
Robert Whigham (1865-1950). In the 1950s, he contributed to
The European, a magazine edited by
Diana Mosley. In the early 1960s he moved to Italy to devote himself entirely to writing. In 1965 Whigham moved to the United States after working as an actor, broadcaster, and scriptwriter for the
British Broadcasting Corp. At the BBC, he coordinated the first features focusing on Pound, Santayana, and Williams. In 1968–69 he was a guest lecturer in poetry at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, as were
Basil Bunting,
Fred Turner, and
Kenneth Rexroth. His seminar classes were popular among undergraduates new to the experience of living, modern poetry. In the mid-1980s he taught a graduate poetry seminar in the Comparative Literature Department at the
University of California, Berkeley.
The Blue Winged Bee was honored by the
Poetry Book Society in 1969 in England. The dust jacket and frontispiece for this book was done by artist and professor
Gary Hugh Brown. Whigham's poetry appeared in several poetry anthologies, including
23 Modern Poets, Penguin Book of Love Poems, and
Twenty Times in One Place. ==Death==