Nostalgic for a heroic past, Masefield champions the traditional virtues and exposes the hypocrisy of twentieth-century pessimism, for he proposes to reclaim "a perception of the Life of the Universe," and he asserts that "Great art cannot and will not appear in generations or nations careless of the finer kinds of intellect, and therefore not attuned to the spirit of the Universe, which is all splendour and beauty."
John Edward Masefield was born on 1 June 1878 to Caroline and Edward Masefield. In his autobiography Masefield refers to his early life at the "Knapp" in Ledbury as a "Paradise," and, as Constance Babington Smith points out in her 1978 biography of the author, the child's Ledbury experiences were set in the magnificent fields and meadows of Herefordshire, with the Malvern Hills to the east, commercial traffic on the canal, and the literary magic of the nearby Welsh border. Masefield's doting mother encouraged the boy to memorize poems, and a comfortable Victorian respectability was provided by his father's work as a solicitor in the family law firm.
As a young child, Masefield discovered an imaginative ability, which he recalls in So Long to Learn (1952) as a major Wordsworthian epiphany: "one wonderful day, when I was little more than five years old, as I stood looking north, over a clump of honeysuckle in flower, I entered that greater life; and that life entered into me with a delight that I can never forget.
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