Martin Seymour-Smith

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Martin Seymour-Smith (b.1928 - July 1, 1998) was a British poet, critic and biographer.

He began as one of the most promising of Anglophone post-war poets, but became more famous as a critic, writing biographies of Robert Graves (whom he met first at age 14), Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy, and producing numerous critical studies. He was also interested in astrology.

His Guide to Modern World Literature is an encyclopedic attempt to describe all major 20th-century authors, in all languages. The book is over 1000 pages long. It has been found eccentric and occasionally frustrating but always readable and highly stimulating. The polyglot Seymour-Smith used the book to champion writers he regarded as underrated, such as James Hanley, Laura Riding, Pio Baroja and Jose Maria Arguedas, while attacking those he felt were overvalued, such as George Bernard Shaw, W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot.

He also wrote other large surveys of literature, including 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written and Novels and Novelists, A Guide to the World of Fiction (1980).