James Michie was a poet and a publisher who achieved notable success in both roles. However, although he did not lack vanity, he was not a man to promote himself, and was not as well known as he deserved to be.

As an editor at Heinemann and then as editorial director at the Bodley Head in the 1950s and 1960s he took on Sylvia Plath's first volume of poems, commissioned Michael Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey and got hold of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. For his Collected Poems he won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1995, at the age of 68.

James Michie was born in 1927 in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was a banker. His brother Donald (obituary, July 12, 2007) became Britain's leading expert on artificial intelligence and was Professor of Machine Intelligence at Edinburgh. James went to Marlborough and Trinity College, Oxford, where he read Greats before switching to English. At Oxford, he met Kingsley Amis, who was to figure in his later life in various ways. They showed each other their poems, and Amis reluctantly concluded that Michie's were better than his. In 1949 they edited Oxford Poetry, the famous anthology published annually by Blackwell, and were both proud of having found for it the poet Elizabeth Jennings.

After Oxford Michie was due to do National Service but became a conscientious objector. Later he wrote a poem, Dooley is a Traitor, which Philip Larkin included in his Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. It is a robust, half-comic argument between a judge and a man who has happily murdered people for private reasons but who is a sturdy supporter of pacifism, and who seems in the poem to get the better of the argument. This was the kind of morally intriguing situation that Michie liked to address in his poems.

Instead of National Service Michie worked at Guy's as a hospital porter, helped to build houses for refugees in Germany and worked for the YMCA in Jamaica. In 1954 he married his first wife, Daphne Segre, who came from Jamaica to study at the Royal College of Music, and became a well-known music teacher.

He worked for Alan Ross's London Magazine and then joined Heinemann, where he acquired a reputation for spotting writers and for winning their affection as he steered their books through to publication. He was a meticulous editor and proof-reader. In 1962 he was persuaded by Graham Greene to move to the Bodley Head, where he was particularly remembered for the care with which he edited the translation of Cancer Ward. The socialite Alastair Forbes called him “the Bodley Egghead”.

However, he also liked his leisure, and often spent long hours in Gaston's French pub (the York Minster, now known as the French House) in Soho, which in the 1960s was a particularly spirited patch of literary Bohemia, frequented by writers such as Frank Norman, the Cockney author of the musical Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'be.

By now, too, Michie had married again, this time to Sarah Courtauld, and his financial situation had become much more comfortable. The couple lived in Eaton Terrace, and had three children before they were divorced in 1982. Michie reduced his working week to two days, asked for longer holidays, and in the end left publishing.

Meanwhile, he continued to write poems. His first volume, Possible Laughter, contained 32 poems, and was published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1959. The title was a particularly apt one for Michie's poems.

With its long rolling lines, Dooley is a Traitor is not in fact, in its style, a typical poem of Michie's. Most of them are measured, elegant poems, in which some disconcerting fact about human nature is teased out, faced up to and then considered for whatever wry humour can be got out of it. Michie's conversation was very like this too. He spoke calmly and ironically about himself and other people, their follies and mishaps, then a slight, sympathetic smile would play over his features.

In one poem he is sitting on a river-bank, fishing, with satire as his fishing rod. But what his satire draws up from the water is “an ancient, horrifying conger”. He identifies this monster as “the long lie of his education”. But this is more than satire can deal with. The fishing line breaks, and the ugly creature goes back into the river. With a faint smile, Michie both looks at a horrible aspect of life as he sees it, and acknowledges how ineffective his satire is in dealing with it.

He published only two more volumes of his poetry, New and Selected Poems in 1983, and Collected Poems in 1994. He won the Hawthornden Prize for the latter volume in spite of the general preference of the prize jury to give the award to a younger writer. On this occasion the jury felt that there was more to be said for giving it to a poet who had not had due recognition.

Michie also published a number of volumes of his translations of poetry. He was particularly admired for his translation of Horace's Odes (1964). W.H.Auden remarked that he would have liked to translate Horace but had dismissed the idea after reading Michie's version, since he did not expect to see a better one. Other notable translations by Michie included Martial's Epigrams, Virgil's Eclogues, Ovid's Ars Amatoria and La Fontaine's Fables. Horace's calm and Martial's scabrous sex comedy were especially dear to him.

After his divorce from his second wife, Michie's standard of living declined and he lived a more inconsequential, raffish life. He had a daughter by Tatiana Orlov, and a son by Clare Asquith, with whom he spent many years, and who looked after him to the last. He continued to have many friends in the literary world.

He also found other interesting things to do. He proposed to Kingsley Amis that they edit an anthology of short poems — the limit was set at 13 lines in order to exclude sonnets. Amis agreed, and a contract was signed with Oxford University Press. However, Amis eventually withdrew since he did not feel that they had found enough good short poems to justify the book.

Recalling this incident in his Memoirs, Amis also observed grumpily that although Michie had invited him to lunch to discuss the matter, in the end he himself had had to pay for it, and he criticised Michie's meanness. In the fortnight after Amis's book was published, Michie received eight consolatory invitations to lunch from friends. However, Amis had at least added that “I still read the old fellow's accomplished and elegant translations”. In the end, the Oxford Book of Short Poems did appear, in 1985, edited by Michie and his friend, the poet P.J.Kavanagh.

Michie's main activity, apart from his poetry, in his later years was as the setter of literary competitions in The Spectator, under the pseudonym Jaspistos. He also went into The Spectator for two days a week to read the proofs. He had no complaints about this relatively humble job, and added to it the reading of the proofs of Elan, the literary and arts section of The European. On the two days of the week when he was in at The Spectator, he would sit at a window to eat his lunch — a tin of sardines or baked beans, with a small bottle of red wine — and exchange banter with Mark Amory, the paper's literary editor.

As Jaspistos he found ample employment for his wit and learning. For one competition he asked readers to submit a short story called, like Trollope's novel, Can You Forgive Her?. Reporting on the result, he quoted Punch magazine, which hated the heroine and called Trollope's book Can You Stand Her? and Henry James, who said he could “forget her, too”. Michie's conversation was always laced with such things.

He kept up the competitions until he went into hospital this year, and confiding in his readers that he hated the food he was given there, he asked them from his bed to write an “Ode to Vegetables”. He received some sympathetic and some bracing entries, one of which began: “I've never known a patient quite like you, / Jaspistos: no, you can't have Irish stew.”

He died bravely, and he is survived by his five children. He had a new poem of his own that he would recite to visitors to his bedside, called Cancer, or the Biter Bitten: “I used to fancy crabmeat as a treat: / Now Crab's the epicure, and I'm the meat.”

James Michie, poet, publisher and translator, was born on June 24, 1927. He died on October 30, 2007, aged 80