Typewritten Poem ("The Undertaker's Rave") with annotations by the poet's hand & (on the same page beneath the poem) a short handwritten note with his signature. George MacBeth was born in Shotts, Lanarkshire, Scotland. The son of a coal miner, he won a scholarship to study at New College, Oxford, where he earned a first in philosophy and classics. He went on to produce radio programs for the BBC and during his tenure produced a number of influential poetry and literature programs. MacBeth’s own work is identified with The Group, a circle of poets associated with a workshop model and generally seen as rejecting the prevailing irony of British poetry at the time in favor of personal, sometimes extravagant, verse. MacBeth’s collections of poetry include A Form of Words (1954), The Broken Places (1963), The Night of Stones and A War Quartet (1969), The Burning Cone (1970), The Orlando Poems (1971), and Shrapnel and A Poet’s Year (1973). MacBeth read with Allen Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, a reading linked to new directions in British poetry and sometimes described as the start of the British Poetry Revival.