Charles Madge

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Charles Madge (1912-1996), was an English poet and journalist, now most remembered as one of the founders of Mass-Observation.

He was educated at Winchester College, and Magdalene College, Cambridge (which he left without a degree). He was a literary figure from his early twenties, becoming a friend of David Gascoyne; like Gascoyne he was generally classed as a surrealist poet. He worked for a spell as a reporter for the Daily Mirror. By the end of the 1930s, he was more involved in Mass-Observation surveys and reports, socialist realism (in theory) and Communism.

Faber and Faber published his poetry as The Disappearing Castle (1937) and The Father Found (1940).

In 1938, he married the poet Kathleen Raine (previously married to Hugh Sykes Davies), and then in 1942 Inez Spender (previously married to Stephen Spender). In 1984, he married Evelyn Brown.