Brian Higgins (poet)

Brian Higgins (1930 –1965) was an Irish poet, mathematician and professional rugby league footballer.

‘Born at Batley in 1930, bored at Bradford in 1940, in 1950 he had an affair with the gamma function. He was educated in 1960 at the "York Minster", Soho.’

Thus states the biographical note on the endpaper of Brian Higgins's first book of poems, "The Only Need". Brian Higgins died in 1965, before his third book of poems "The Northern Fiddler" appeared. In an introduction to this book the poet George Barker wrote that Higgins "had perceived that the secret at the heart of affairs constituted the most ingenious practical joke, which only a man who was at one and the same time a mathematician and a poet of sentiment could start functioning for the amusement and edification of all concerned." Higgins called himself "a realist who wished to be romantic".