His mother, a niece of the actors Cyril Maude and Winifred Emery, was one of two young women present when the dramatist W. S. Gilbert died in his lake at Grim's Dyke in May 1911.

[2] However, it was Man's Life is This Meat (1936), collecting his early surrealism and translations of French surrealists, and Hölderlin's Madness (1938) that established his reputation.

[3] He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936 and travelled to Spain, where he broadcast some radio talks for the Barcelona-based propaganda ministry.

[4] The diaries Gascoyne kept for six years from 1936 projected an existentialist auto-criticism, recording with honesty his acute emotional and spiritual crises, his struggle to accept his sexual identity as a homosexual, and his affairs.

[6] Gascoyne spent the years just before World War II in Paris, where he became friends with Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Breton, Paul Éluard and Pierre Jean Jouve.

[7] In a poetic field dominated by W. H. Auden and other more political and social poets, the surrealist group tended to be overlooked by critics and the public.

Although Poems 1937–1942 (illustrated by Graham Sutherland and edited by Tambimuttu) received critical acclaim at the time, it was only with renewed interest in experimental writing associated with the British Poetry Revival that their work began to be discussed again.

In his later years his attention was drawn to a balanced assessment of his work by Martin Seymour-Smith in his immense Guide to Modern World Literature (Macmillan), and he was gratified by the tone of the commentary and the assertion that he was still widely read.

A tribute volume, For David Gascoyne On His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, appeared in 1981 with contributions from 26 poets, including Adrian Henri, Lawrence Durrell, and Michael Hamburger.