He was born in Batley, Yorkshire. He was a gifted mathematician and, briefly, a professional Rugby League footballer. He then became a schoolteacher; but soon abandoned this for a literary career, at which he was also unsuccessful. After living from hand to mouth for some years, he died of a rare heart disease. As a poet he first came to attention through X and it was one of X's editors, Patrick Swift, who first put him up - or as David Wright has said: 'put up with him' - in London. Wright amusingly goes on to recall: " More than once Swift and I had to sit on his head to stop him writing furious letters full of impossible pecuniary demands to whichever was the unfortunate punblisher of the moment. Higgins would say, with impenetrable logic: 'Look, it's going to cost them £500 to publish these rubbishy poems. Why don't they give me the £500 and not publish?' "

Martin Seymour-Smith says that "in some twenty poems, including ‘Snow and Poetry’ and ‘A Slight Unease’, he achieved a surprisingly precise, elegant and metaphysical voice that might well have been developed had he lived."

And David Wright on Higgins in Poetry Review: "Martin Seymour-Smith remarks in his Guide to Modern World Literature, ‘a hit-or-miss poet . . . who had too little time to exercise control over his considerable intelligence’. But one or two of his poems sustain a comparison with Blake, that else might seem fatuous, made by a reviewer of his last and posthumous book in the New Statesman (which of course never published a line by Higgins while he was alive; despite or because of the abusive letters Higgins used to hurl at its editor)...Useless to speculate what he might have done or been; but with his going there closed a window which would have let fresh air into the hothouse. Some of us might have felt the draught."

Poem

Welfare X = Y, by Brian Higgins

I am a digit soon to be cancelled out. /What does it matter, an integer, more or less? /For allowance is made in the rules that the world is a mess, /Plus or minus a few perhaps, but it's right...just about. /A knife in my guts is the line of a pen through my mark /And all my biography told in the numbers to ten /The cock of my eye to the sun and the laugh of my soul to the dark, /For I am one of the faceless signs, one of the Welfare Men. /The decimals stutter and this is the lie they repeat. /"The years that he lived are accountable for in the main /Add him up on the left and the right and it balances neat /A few blank months...but we soon got him working again". /Yes, ordinate and abscissa, they chose for the graph /The amount of Time spent related to What is Produced /And a line through incorellate points is my strange epitaph /"With the usual allowance for error X equals Y is educed." /

-Reprinted from The Only Need, Brian Higgins. Published by Abelard-Schuman London, 1960.