Clere Parsons (1908–1931) was an English poet whose brief life yielded a small but highly regarded body of work. Born in India, he was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became active in the university's literary scene. During his time there, he edited the 1928 edition of Oxford Poetry, showcasing an early commitment to the craft and his peers.
Parsons's poetic style was heavily influenced by contemporaries such as W. H. Auden and Laura Riding. He demonstrated a keen modernist sensibility that blended intellectual rigor with formal experimentation. Despite his immense potential, his career was tragically cut short. Parsons suffered from Type I diabetes and died of pneumonia at the age of twenty-three. His only collection, titled Poems, was published posthumously by the prestigious house Faber & Faber, cementing his reputation among the literary circles of his day.
Though his output was limited by his early death, Parsons's work has endured in key anthologies, including the Oxford University Press Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry and Penguin Books' Poetry of the Thirties. His writing earned praise from prominent literary figures like Geoffrey Grigson and C. H. Sisson. Biographer Richard Burton later remarked in his study of Basil Bunting that, based on the evidence of his surviving poems, Parsons would have likely become a highly significant voice in twentieth-century British poetry.
