The poet, pacifist and founder and editor of the poetry magazine Aquarius tells Peter Stanford that he is a Catholic who finds it difficult to believe in God

“She was very puritanical.” Eddie Linden is remembering Dorothy Day, with whom he shared a correspondence in the early 1960s. “She used to call herself a Catholic advocate,” he recalls, “and she was quite radical, but in an American way.”

They only met the once. In 1963, the Scottish poet, now 82, and the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement whose cause for canonisation is being actively considered by the Vatican, came face-to-face when both attended the London wedding of their mutual friends, Adrian and Angela Cunningham, among the founders of the magazine Slant. In the era of the Second Vatican Council, it had made quite a reputation for itself by combining Catholicism with Marxist politics.