University of Otago

"£100 & a butt of sack yearly"

The Office of the Poet Laureate
Eusden & Cibber
Whitehead
Warton
Pye
Southey
Wordsworth
Tennyson
Austin & Bridges
Masefield
Lewis & Betjeman
Hughes & Motion
Refusals & Rejects

John Masefield

Constance Babington Smith, John Masefield. A Life

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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


John Masefield, Salt-water Ballads. 10th ed.

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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


John Masefield, Grace before Ploughing: Fragments of Autobiography.

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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


John Masefield, On the Hill  and Reynard the Fox

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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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