'Now hear this" – the three words that Christopher Logue, who has died aged 85, used to open his epic poem War Music were aptly chosen. In this stark modern rendition of The Iliad, Homer's ancient Greek account of the siege of Troy, the invocation to the muse commands the listener's attention with the insistence born of first-hand experience of military life.
This was one of the diverse worlds that Logue encountered in his efforts to sustain an existence as a poet. He also wrote for the film director Ken Russell, for the Royal Court theatre in London, jazz poetry ballads, columns for Private Eye and a pornographic novel. As a political activist, he protested with Bertrand Russell against nuclear weapons; but before then, he had served as a soldier in the Black Watch – and spent 16 months in an army prison.
It was the radio producer Donald Carne-Ross's invitation to reimagine The Iliad for BBC radio that set Logue on the journey of creativity that was to be his principal legacy. Carne-Ross dismissed his lack of Greek as no hindrance to the task, and Logue set about using existing translations – or "cribs" as he called them – from Alexander Pope, George Chapman and others, as well as literal versions from Carne-Ross himself.
The prototype of War Music, entitled Achilles and the River, was broadcast in 1959. It provoked interest, and Logue tackled a second section, which he called The Death of Patroclus (1963) and had recorded on an LP with the help of Douglas Cleverdon, who had produced Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood for BBC radio, and the actors Vanessa Redgrave and Alan Dobie. It bears all the marks of the work's eventual five print volumes: War Music (1981), Kings (1991), The Husbands (1995), All Day Permanent Red (2003) and Cold Calls (2005). Apart from a hiatus caused by depression in the 1970s, the work – which had been intended to run to a sixth volume – occupied the rest of his life.
Louis MacNeice said of Logue's Homer poem that never was blood bloodier or fate more fatal, and while Logue remained faithful to Homer's approach, redrawing the similes and gory detail of the original, he nevertheless made it his own, sometimes even inventing original passages and characters. Logue himself subtitled it an "account" of The Iliad; critics called it Logue's Iliad rewritten or simply Logue's Homer.
His achievement was to invigorate the dramatic storytelling voice in the ancient work. This he did in a contemporary style that is at times cinematic. For instance, at one point he shifts scene with a simple line: "Cut to the fleet."
Modern pop-cultural references pervade it: All Day Permanent Red was a catchline for a lipstick advert. The violence is visceral, almost pornographic, in detail and has all the drama of an eyewitness account true in spirit to Homer's original:
As he fell back, back arched,
God blew the javelin straight; and thus
Mid-air, the cold bronze apex sank
Between his teeth and tongue, parted his brain,
Pressed on, and stapled him against the upturned hull
Logue was a sort of magpie of poetry – there are sections lifted from Brecht and others, and he rewrote existing reports of violence into his descriptions. "I'm fickle," he said in an Observer interview in 2006. "Almost everything I do is based on other texts. Without plagiarism, there would be no literature. I'm a rewrite man. A complete rewrite man, like our Willy Shakespeare."
Born in Portsmouth and brought up in the area, Christopher was the only child of middle-aged parents, John and Molly Logue, who married late. His father, a post office worker, was proud and doting despite his son's misdemeanours, which included using a toy pistol to rob a little girl of her ice-cream, and getting six months' probation from a juvenile court for stealing copies of Men Only and The Naturist. Logue's education switched from the Catholic St John's college, Southsea, to Prior Park college, Bath. He had few friends there, and finished his studies at Portsmouth grammar school.
Having acquired a somewhat romantic image of military life, he then enlisted. He told his recruiter that he wanted to join the commandos. Learning that he must first join a regiment, he chose the Black Watch, since it was the only regiment he knew by name. However, army life did not suit him, and his posh voice – formed in part by the poetry recitals he had taken part in as a boy – set him apart; his comrades nicknamed him "Charlotte".
In the following year, 1945, his battalion was posted to Palestine, and a foolish boast to a fellow soldier that he was going to sell on some stolen army paybooks got him arrested and court-martialled. He served his prison term in Palestine and Scotland.
A string of impecunious jobs in London – including park attendant and dentist's receptionist – followed, and his ambition to study at Oxford slipped his grasp. The frustration of his desire to become a poet led to a suicide attempt.
In 1951, Logue quit dull postwar London for bohemian Paris. There he became part of an expat literary community that included the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi. Logue joined Trocchi's editorial team on the literary magazine Merlin. The first edition included one of Logue's poems, and his debut collection, Wand and Quadrant (1953), was published by an offshoot imprint of the journal. Logue soon discovered that if poetry did not pay, then writing pornography for Maurice Girodias's Paris-based Olympia Press did.
Under the pseudonym of Count Palmiro Vicarion, Logue wrote Lust and a collection of bawdy limericks for Girodias, the publisher of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955). Trocchi proved to be a real friend: he saved Logue from his second suicide attempt, provoked by the feelings of sexual timidity that troubled him for most of his life, and about which he wrote candidly in his memoir Prince Charming (1999).
His return to London in 1956 coincided with the revolution in British theatre sparked by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and he fell in with the Observer theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, later literary manager of the National Theatre, and the film director Lindsay Anderson. With Anderson he collaborated on the musical The Lily White Boys (1959) at the Royal Court.
Logue's verse flourished with poems in the New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement. Be Not Too Hard touched wider cultural shores when, in 1967, a setting by the singer-songwriter Donovan appeared on the soundtrack of the film Poor Cow, and was recorded by Joan Baez on her album Joan. Manfred Mann's Earth Band took it up seven years later for their album The Good Earth.
Of Logue's experiments with jazz poetry, Red Bird (1960) was commissioned by the BBC, recorded by the Beatles producer George Martin for EMI and matched Logue's clipped vocal renditions of Pablo Neruda's poems to jazz arrangements by Tony Kinsey and Bill Le Sage. His words were then set to jazz music and sung by Annie Ross at Peter Cook's Soho club, The Establishment. Richard Ingrams, the editor of Private Eye, who later took on Logue as the compiler of its perennial True Stories and Pseuds Corner features, recalled them "more vividly than the sketches at The Establishment … They had very clever satirical lyrics".
Some of Logue's poetry expressed his political voice, too, as in I Shall Vote Labour, which includes the lines:
I shall vote Labour because if I don't somebody else will …
I shall vote Labour because if I do not vote Labour my balls will drop off …
I shall vote Labour because I am a hopeless drug addict … I shall vote Labour because Labour will build more maximum security prisons … I shall vote Labour because deep in my heart I am a Conservative
Logue went on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's first Aldermaston march, in 1958, and was a member of Bertrand Russell's Committee of 100 – public figures, among them Doris Lessing, John Berger, Osborne and Anderson, prepared to break the law in an attempt to influence the government's nuclear policy and Britain's relationship with the US. He was jailed for a month for refusing to accept a court order to desist from demonstrating – "a political prisoner in all but name", as he described the experience.
Later he teamed up with Arnold Wesker to bring art to the workers, giving poetry readings on factory floors with limited success. Better received was a Royal Albert Hall poetry "happening" in 1965 that captured the countercultural mood of the time. The four-hour versathon, officially the International Poetry Incarnation, though in Peter Whitehead's documentary dubbed the Wholly Communion, featured Allen Ginsberg, Michael Horovitz and Adrian Mitchell as well as Logue – who also opened the 40th anniversary of the event in 2005.
When I got hold of a secondhand LP of The Death of Patroclus I was immediately captivated by the live dramatic storytelling. Redgrave softly spoke, Dobie thundered, but there was a voice that cut through with keen metallic fury. It was the voice of Logue himself. I heard it in a spectrum of tones over the period that I co-directed War Music for the stage, first in 1998 in London and Bristol, and again in 2000 as part of the BBC's Millennium Music Week. It was energetically free-reined at the staging we had chosen (we performed it in total darkness; Logue came to see it twice) and then twisted on a sixpence to viscerally spit anger at my suggestion to visually supplement the images he had created with words: "It's about the TEXT," he screamed, his voice driving into the ear like the spear-heads he vividly describes parting the skulls and brains of Trojan soldiers.
He was ambitious to see the work live in a different way, generously contacting producers such as Michael White and Michael Kustow to see it at Battersea Arts Centre. But it was the small glimpse into his working process that was so curious and valuable to me. When I asked him for the meaning of a line or reference, he cited the poets he had borrowed from, couldn't remember some of them and said one entire section was a translation of an ancient Japanese war poem – revealing that it was an eclectic work drawn from many sources.
At his home in Camberwell, south London, no computer in sight, he showed me his "sketchbook": a chart plastered with yellow Post-it notes, each with meticulous tight handwriting mapping out his narrative odyssey through Homer's war poem.
Friends described him as out on a limb, subversive, spoiling for a scrap. Others called him rude. He won only a handful of literary prizes including, late in life, the 2005 Whitbread award for poetry for Cold Calls. Surprisingly, his name was hardly mentioned as a possible poet laureate after Ted Hughes's death in 1998, but in 2002 he accepted a civil list pension from the Queen, and five years later was appointed CBE.
He is survived by his wife, the writer, critic and biographer Rosemary Hill, whom he married in 1985.
• Christopher Logue, poet, born 23 November 1926; died 2 December 2011
