Life
1900-1956 [orig. Geoffrey Basil Phibbs]; b. Norfolk, raised [Co.] Sligo; joined Irish Guards; worked various as demonstrator in College of Science; librarian; factory-worker in London and school-teacher in Cairo; worked with Nancy Nicholson at the Poulk (Hogarth) Press; m. Norah McGuinness in London and had a dg. with her (divorced 1929); changed name to Taylor following his father’s refusal to allow his wife over the threshold; became Poetry Editor of The Bell in succession to Frank O’Connor; Withering of the Figleaf (1927), A Dash of Garlic (1933), poems; also gardening works, e.g. The Victorian Flower Garden (1952); Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1951; rep. 1958), an anthology which includes short biographical notes; also ed., Irish Poems of Today (1944), from vols. 1-7 of The Bell [as below]; lived in Georgian house in Tallaght. DIW

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Works
Irish Poems Today, chosen from the first seven volumes of “The Bell”, ed. Geoffrey Taylor (Dublin: Irish People’s Publications 1944), 48pp. [25 poems]. Editor’s Note: ‘... They form a small, nearly representative, sample of the valid contemporary English poetry by Irish writers. To make an Irish anthology fully representative one should, I think, include work by three other Irish poets whose poems would lend lustre to these pages. I mean Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, and Austin Clarke. But it has been the policy of The Bell to look rather for poems by young or - at the time when we first printed them little-known poets.’ [&C]. Includes are Maurice Craig [2 poems]; Maurice Farley [1]; Robert Greacen [1, ‘The Bird’]; John Hewitt [3]; Valentin Iremonger [1]; Sean Jennett [1]; Patrick Kavanagh [1, Kednaminsha]; Freda Laughton [1]; Cecil Day Lews [1, Hornpipe – with ed. acknowledgement that he is not little known]; Dnagh MacDonagh [1]; Roy McFadden [1, Plaint of the Working-Man]; Nick Nicholls [1]; Roibeard Ó Farachain [1, Exile Song of Colmcille]; D J O’Sullivan [2]; W R Rodgers 3, Ireland; Poem; The party]; Geoffrey Taylor [1, Boat-haven, Co. Mayo]; Bruce Williamson [1]. [Query title, Irish Poems of Today as per Hyland 224.]

Criticism
Frank O’Connor, My Father’s Son (1968), pp.77-79.

Donagh MacDonagh, ed. Poems from Ireland (Dublin The Irish Times 1944).

Hubert Butler, essay on The Bell, in Anthill.

Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press 1998), p.173f.

Stephen Dodd, review article for Irish Independent, Living/Leisure (16 July 1995)

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Notes
Portrait: There is a photo port. of Geoffrey Phibbs [sic], copyright Norah McGuinness, among ills. in Frank O’Connor, My Father’s Son (NY: A. Knopf 1969), pls. after p.114. [Not found in the London edition.]

Namesake: A Geoffrey England Taylor was Thomas MacGreevy’s fellow-recruit to an artillery regiment in World War I, and the dedicatee of MacGreevy’poem “Nocturne”, composed in 1917-18 (viz., ‘To Geoffrey England Taylor, 2nd Lieutenant, RFA, “Died of Wounds”).

Anthony Cronin, ‘The Robert Graves I knew’, deals very briefly with Phibbs (‘once well known in literary Dublin’; q. source, p.5)

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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)