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John Masefield |
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By 1913, John Masefield (1878-1967)
was sufficiently established as a poet to succeed Alfred Austin.
The appointment, however, went to Robert Bridges and it was some
17 years before Ramsay McDonald, the then Prime Minister, appointed
Masefield. Next to Tennyson, he was the longest serving poet laureate.
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Constance Babington Smith, John Masefield. A Life. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978.
Cen. PR 6025 A77 Z5 B251
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At thirteen Masefield went
to sea and much of his ocean-going experiences are reflected in
prose works such as A Mainsail Haul (1905) and A Tarpaulin Muster
(1907), and in his poetry. His Salt-water Ballads, published in
1902, contains the well-known lyrics 'Cargoes' and 'Sea-Fever'
and earned him the title 'Poet of the Sea'. Here is
his classic 'Sea-Fever' with the familiar 'I must
down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky…'.
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John Masefield, Salt-water Ballads. 10th ed. London: Elkin Mathews,
1924.
Bra. PR 6025 A77 S2 1924
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Robert Bridges lived a life
devoted wholly to poetry, like Tennyson and Wordsworth before him.
John Masefield was an all-round man of letters and his affinities
are with past laureates Southey and Dryden. Indeed, from 1902 to
1952, he published nearly a hundred original books, and edited or
wrote introductions to numerous others. In this fragmentary autobiography,
he tells of his boyhood in Herefordshire and Worcestershire.
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John Masefield, Grace before Ploughing: Fragments of Autobiography.
London: Heinemann, 1966.
Bra. PR 6025 A77 Z5 A34
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Aside from the sea, Masefield's
other love was England - its countryside, landscape and people.
Even those down on their luck gained his sympathy: 'Not the
ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road,/ The slave
with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,/ The man
with too weighty a burden, too heavy a load…'. In 1935,
Masefield received the Order of Merit for his contribution to literature.
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John Masefield, On the Hill (London: Heinemann, 1949. Bra. PR 6025
A77 05) and Reynard the Fox (London: W. Heinemann, 1946. Bra. PR
6025 A77 R4 1946)
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