A short article in The Times in 1961, looking back on very misunderstood dimensions of the pre-Second World War literary world, observes:

Nowhere does this article mention the name of Squire, and yet every single term seems perfectly suited to sum up his impressively rich, diverse, genial, generous, companionable life. Sadly, the pattern of Squire’s rise and fall also conforms perfectly to that of the archetypal tragic hero: a one-time great and influential figure who, for want perhaps of the prerequisite social pedigree and weakened by a tragic flaw, gradually fell from the heights, and was left to the mercy of pithy jibes and caricatures.

Squire was born and raised in Devonshire, in a family largely maintained and nurtured by his mother, a sensitive, literature-loving and highly musical woman, after the father absconded. A scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, to read history provided the first major turning-point in his life. He discovered his life-long passion for poetry, also engaging dynamically in play-reading circles and amateur dramatics, musical societies, political debates and sport, and in particular cricket, which remained an abiding passion to the end. During the Cambridge years he also met his future wife, Eileen Wilkinson, a committed fighter for women’s rights and also a gifted literary personality in her own right. Together they joined the Fabian Society and participated in various emerging socialist movements, while Squire began publishing the writings for which he would soon be renowned and highly respected: parodies, epigrams, literary reviews and, of course, poetry. He also published translations of Baudelaire’s poetry that were much admired. His acute musical sensibility played into this success; very much like KM, he had an ear for the natural flow of speech, perfectly pitched alternations between quips and bathos, the passing idiosyncrasies of idiolect and sociolect, ‘a joyous sense of the ridiculous’, and the pulse of rhythm and song-lines woven into and gently tussling with more conventional poetic forms and meters.