There was Ted Hughes, of course, whose huge bird-like shadow fell across us all; there was Harold Massingham, an almost forgotten figure now, who lived in Mexborough like Hughes did and who published two books of rock-hewn work in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and there was Vernon Scannell.

Scannell was, I reckon, a superb role model. In an era when poets graduate from sixth-form writing workshop to creative writing degree to poet-in-residence, he had lived a proper life.

He'd been in the Army, and although he took part in the
D-Day landings, he was no ordinary hero: he deserted at least twice and was put in prison for it. He trained as a boxer and it always seemed to me that his poems were prepared in the same way that you might prepare for a boxing match.

There was the gruelling road-work of learning how to rhyme and scan, how to place words so carefully that the reader forgot about the metre until the music of the phrases insisted on it; there was the poetic keep-fit of endless workshops and residencies and courses, and there was the fighter's diet, in Scannell's case a diet of reading and reading and strong drink and more reading.

As fellow poet Alan Brownjohn noted after his death, Scannell's letters, even in his last months, were full of reports of reading "just-published volumes of writers' memoirs or letters, old favourites such as Siegfried Sassoon, new novels and work by younger poets". I hope I'm still reading as widely when I'm in my 80s.

One of my early favourite books of Scannell's, though, wasn't a collection of poems, it was a volume of autobiography called A Proper Gentleman that came out in 1977, and which seems to have been ignored by the obituarists I've read over the last few days.

From my point of view, 1977 was a pretty momentous year; I was coming to the end of my time at North Staffordshire Polytechnic and I wanted to be a full-time poet. I'd had a few things published in magazines and I'd read some of my deathless verse out in folk clubs to mixed reactions, but I wasn't quite what a full-time freelance poet did, apart from write poems and drink beer.

A Proper Gentleman' describes Scannell's experiences as a Resident Poet in the new village of Berinsfield in Oxfordshire; in those far-off days the notion of poet-in-residence wasn't as developed as it is now. Then, the Arts Council would decide that a place should have a poet and he or she would be parachuted in.

In Vernon Scannell's case, he was given a new house in Berinsfield to the consternation of local people who probably wanted and needed the house more than he did. In the book, Scannell describes his first morning in the almost-bare house.

He's had a few drinks the night before and he's woken up, in a groggy and decidedly unpoetic state, by the TV presenter Robert Robinson with a film crew, who want to know what he thinks of his new job. Scannell is really in no fit state to give a proper and considered answer.

Later he finds out that one of the locals, seeing him moving in, had described him as "A Proper Gentleman", which to me (and perhaps to Scannell) spoke volumes about the public's perception of what a poet is. The residency begins to fall to pieces: local youths taunt Scannell and chuck bricks at his window, and attempts to get people writing and reading poems are hard, hard work. Through all this farcical and potentially chaotic situation Vernon Scannell retains his dignity. The poems are the thing for him; always the poems.

So for me he became a kind of proper hero, to paraphrase the Berinsfield local and my own second paragraph in this piece. His poems really shouldn't have been the kind of poems I was interested in because most of my own reading and writing in those days came from the Dylan Thomas and punk-music inspired end of the wordy spectrum.

On the whole I liked work that didn't rhyme or scan, that tried to push the boundaries of how a poem ticked, and was endlessly romantic about the figure of The Poet. But I loved Scannell's work simply because there was no flash to it, no fireworks.

His work was like a real sunset beside a huge and garish painting of a sunset, like a real violin playing in a world of synthesised strings.

As the years have gone by and I've got older and my appreciation of the craft of poetry deepened, Scannell was always there, always being an example of what a poet should be.

And now he's gone.

But we have the work, and the memories of the man. A proper gentleman. A proper poet.