Eddie Linden, who has died aged 88, was the editor of the poetry magazine Aquarius, the author of two books of poems, and the subject of a biography. Yet there has seldom been a less likely literary figure.
Abandonment stalked Eddie throughout his life, together with Catholic guilt – not least over his homosexuality – and the challenge of semi-literacy. In spite of being rejected at birth by his unmarried mother, who came from Northern Ireland, and the cruelty of those charged with his care in Scotland, he retained an intrinsic decency, which he held to as a precious possession. In the mid- 1960s, by which time he had settled in London, he began to forge a path in the literary world.
