Vernon Scannell was a gifted poet, and also a vigorous champion of poetry, who left school at 14 and largely educated himself. He was already becoming well known as a poet by his mid-twenties. From the age of 40 he lived entirely by his writing and broadcasting, and he was still writing strong and effective poetry almost up to his death.

John Vernon Scannell, whose real surname was Bain, was born in Lincolnshire in 1922, and was brought up in Ireland and later Aylesbury, where his father had a photographic studio that did not bring in much money. He learnt to box at his elementary school, and was an avid reader there.

Like so many children in the 1930s and 1940s he caught his first enthusiasm for poetry from the popular Methuen Anthology of Modern Verse, which, as he later wrote, had many sentimental and inept pieces in it, but also fine work by Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen. One can find the influence of all these brave but melancholy men in his own poetry.

After some miscellaneous jobs and some early sexual adventures, amusingly described in his autobiographical volume, Drums of Morning, he joined the Army in 1940, and served in the Middle East and Normandy in the 51st Highland Division. The horrors of war had a profound effect on him, and appear either overtly or as an undertone in a great deal of his writing. He deserted once in Tunisia after seeing the consequences of a massacre, and was sent to prison in Alexandria. Released on a suspended sentence, he took part in the Normandy landings, where he was wounded on patrol.

While he was convalescing, with the war over, he deserted again, and it was now that he adopted the name Scannell. He went to live with his sister in London, and more miscellaneous jobs followed, including working in a dolls' heads factory, and boxing. He discovered London pubs, and friendly women in them. But he was determined now to become a writer and, above all, a poet.

He moved to Leeds, where he met Bonamy Dobrée, Professor of English at the university, who arranged for him to attend the literature lectures. He also met some younger members of Dobrée's staff, including G. Wilson Knight, a great if eccentric Shakespeare critic, and some of the Leeds bohemians. It was now too that he started to get his poems published — by Tribune, Middleton Murry's Adelphi and the influential Poetry Chicago.

However, his desertion caught up with him. He was arrested and went before a court martial, where he said that after five years in the Army he had to escape it or see the final extinction of his humanity. However, it was when he said that he was a poet that the judges looked worried. He was remanded for a psychiatrist's report and instead of being sent to prison was delivered to a mental hospital. Here a young captain told him, “This is the last place to get well”, and had him discharged within a few weeks. He left in a state of wild exhilaration, and at the same time full of guilt at the thought of his soldier colleagues who were now in prison for desertion, or had died in a war that he had survived.

In 1949 he moved back to London. He found a basement room in Notting Hill, took up a teaching job, drank heavily in the evenings and wrote his first novel, The Fight, a boxing story, which was taken by an enthusiastic young publisher, Peter Nevill. He started giving broadcasting talks and writing short stories for the programme Morning Story, and he wrote some children's stories. His poems appeared in the Listener, The Spectator and Time and Tide, whose literary editor was John Betjeman. He started meeting poets such as Roy Fuller, Laurie Lee, Robert Conquest and Dannie Abse. In 1954 he married the painter Josephine Higson.

He had published an early collection of poems with Fortune Press, Graves and Resurrections, in 1948, but he later rejected the poems in it as “derivative fumbling”. It was with the three volumes of poetry, A Mortal Pitch (1957), The Masks of Love (1960), which won him a Heinemann Award, and A Sense of Danger (1962), that he firmly established himself as a poet, while Walking Wounded (1965) became a wider success, with its title poem being much anthologised.

Scannell was an ebullient and amusing man, yet his poems convey a powerful feeling of doubt and melancholy. In many of them, the last line leaves a chill. In A Mortal Pitch, one poem ends:

I am sentenced: I love: I murder: I sin.

The very next poem in the book is about the way that poets can never really be lovers, or find love: it ends with the poet's words turning

dead as stone,

Leaving him dungeoned, and alone.

A poem in Walking Wounded, My Three Hoboes, tells how he gives three tramps a meal in a hotel where rich and beautiful people are dining. But the three tramps prove to be inside himself:

Lust and loathing and the other bum,

Envy, strongest of the three.

Yet with that feeling of chill, there also goes a sense of triumph. Moral gloom and aesthetic delight - which is itself a form of joy in life - go mysteriously together.

There are also some notable escapes from his ironic mood. His poem No Sense of Direction, which his friends believe was addressed to his wife, is about his own lack of a sense of direction. But, he says, he owes a vast debt to this lack, for

It made me stray

To this lucky path

That ran like a fuse

And brought me to you

And love's bright, soundless

Detonation.

Scannell took part in numerous poetry readings, for which his direct, forceful poems were very suitable. He often performed at the “Poetry and Jazz” evenings organised by Jeremy Robson, with Michael Garrick's quintet. Garrick set some of his poems to jazz, notably his long poem Epithets of War. Robson became his loyal publisher with his firm Robson Books. Scannell's Collected Poems, 1950-93, came out from Robson in 1994.

Scannell wrote nine novels, some of them thrillers; three books of literary criticism, and four volumes of autobiography. The first of these, The Tiger and the Rose (1971), gave only a brief account of his parents, but the last, Drums of Morning, published in 1992 when he was 70, was a revelation. He revealed that his father was a sadist, and that he had made much of Scannell's childhood a misery. That was no doubt part of the reason for Scannell's persistent, underlying melancholy in his earlier years. It was also another reason why he changed his name.

He won the Cholmondely Prize for children's poetry with The Apple Raid in 1974, and was granted a Civil List pension for services to literature in 1981.

His marriage was eventually dissolved, and he was cared for by his companion, Jo Peters, in his later years.

He was writing poems until only a few months ago, and one appeared in The Spectator on September 22. It was again about the Second World War and again with a notable last line. It was called War Words, and began by noting how soldiers were now said to suffer from “post-traumatic stress disorder”. Then it recalled D-Day — and observed that what he and many other soldiers

that day... shared

was “pre-traumatic stress disorder”, or,

as specialists might say, we were

“shit-scared”.

That “specialists” was the true Scannell note.

Vernon Scannell is survived by four children.

Vernon Scannell, poet, was born on January 23, 1922. He died on November 16, 2007, aged 85