John Masefield rose to prominence during the first two decades of the twentieth century as the author of Salt-Water Ballads (1902) and of several popular narrative poems including The Everlasting Mercy (1911) and The Widow in the Bye Street (1912). He...

John Masefield is perhaps best known as the poet laureate of England from 1930 until his death in 1967, and his long career as a minor novelist falls under the shadow of his enormously popular poetry. In recent years readers and critics have ignored...

John Masefield , poet laureate from 1930 to 1967, is best known for his achievements in narrative and lyric verse. Yet he had published twenty novels, seventeen original plays, and three dramas adapted or translated from the French or Norwegian. Most...

During the 1920s John Masefield, the future Poet Laureate, published two novels set in the imaginary Latin American republic of Santa Barbara, Sard Harker (1924) and ODTAA (1926). Both novels touch on the career of the supposedly legendary dictator, Don Manuel, and both...

JOHN MASEFIELD'S "Cargoes" is a very fine poem, packing an enormous amount of imagery and atmosphere into eighty-seven words. It is clear, vivid and immediate, and has been deservedly enshrined as a classic and repeatedly anthologised: Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant...

Today is Saturday, May 12, the 132nd day of 2007. There are 233 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:One hundred years ago, on May 12, 1907, actress Katharine Hepburn was born in Hartford, Conn.On this date:In 1870, an act creating the Canadian province...

Today is Tuesday, Jan. 1, the first day of leap year 2008. There are 365 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:Two hundred years ago, on Jan. 1, 1808, a law prohibiting the importation of slaves into the United States went into effect.On this...

[Masefield's] chief dedication is to what he feels is the English spirit and to the interpretation to the world of that spirit, the land and the heritage from which it springs, and the men and words and deeds that it inspires. (p. 15) From Salt-Water Ballads (1902) to Grace Before Ploughing (1966), there is frequent evidence of [Masefield's] interest in the early years of Britain. In several poems he combines historical reminiscence with his favorite theme of the persistence of human influence...

John Masefield was a copious writer, and one of the most uneven whom our time can show. His official position as Poet Laureate stimulated him to produce, conscientiously and dutifully, a number of morceaux, the poetic equivalent of journalism, works of which the chief interest was the occasion that evoked them. (p. 5) The more closely one comes to consider any aspect of Masefield's work, the more deeply does one realize that the man is, essentially and all the time, a poet. Even at their flattest and...