Christopher Logue, the poet and playwright who called himself the "rewrite man", has died at the age of 85 at his home in London.

He was dubbed the "Alexander Pope of his day" by AN Wilson and was regarded one of the country's leading poets. Although a master of the short and pithy political poem, his major work was the retelling of Homer's epic, the Iliad. Logue's version was published in a number of small books including War Music which won the international Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002, and Cold Calls which won the 2006 Whitbread Poetry Award. Logue spent over 45 years on the project while writing plays for the screen and the theatre, translating Brecht, and editing Pseuds' Corner in the satirical magazine Private Eye.

In the 1940s he even penned a pornographic novel, entitled Lust, under the nom de plume Count Palmiro Vicarion.

His poems were set to music by both jazz musicians and in ballads by Donovan and Joan Baez.

Born in Portsmouth in 1926, Logue volunteered for the army at the age of 17. He lost the sight in his left eye during a training exercise. It was in 1946, in military prison in Scotland, that he began writing poetry.

Logue was a pacifist who marched with CND and joined Bertrand Russell's Committee of 100 which earned him a second spell in prison. In the 1950s he lived in Paris and was friends with writers Alexander Trocchi and Samuel Beckett. He was married to the biographer Rosemary Hill.