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William Cookson (May 8, 1939–January 2, 2003) was a British poet, writer on poetry and literary editor, best-known for his influential poetry magazine Agenda.

He was brought up in Surrey and London, and educated at Westminster School and New College, Oxford. Aged 16, he travelled to Italy to meet Ezra Pound, and he was still a teenager when he launched Agenda in the late 1950s.

On Cookson's death a "Celebratory Issue" of Agenda (Vol. 39, No. 4 (2003)) was published in which his successor as editor of the journal, Patricia McCarthy, described him as "a man who sacrificed his life for poetry and was perhaps the best, most single-minded editor of our day". In addition to a final redaction of "Vestiges and Versions", the issue contains biographical sketches by Edmund Gray and Martin Dodsworth.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "William Cookson", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0