Karl Watts Gransden (24 February 1925 – 25 July 1998) was a British poet and an editor, translator, scholar, and teacher of Latin and English literature.

[4] Students and colleagues took note of his friendship with E. M. Forster, whose authorized biography Gransden had written; he had a similar role as critic and friend of Angus Wilson.

His expertise in ancient and Renaissance literature as well as his own experience as a poet and member of the English literati allowed him to comment in detail on the significance of the museum's holdings.

He analysed the collections of Dylan Thomas's abandoned early experiments in "social realism"; letters from writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield acquired along with the papers of the considerably less well-known S. S. Koteliansky; and the "political manœuvrings" revealed by the museum's enormous cache of Medici Family documents.

[11][2] Gransden was never primarily a poet, but he gained respectability among those who were, and Philip Larkin included his "An Interview" in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse.

In addition to modern literature by older writers in his circle, the subjects of Gransden's early work were primarily poets of the English Renaissance, including John Donne and Edmund Spenser.