Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ben Howard

Critical Essay by Ben Howard

F. T. Prince is an extreme instance of the neglected British poet. To most readers of Poetry, he is probably known only as the author of Soldiers Bathing, one of the finest wartime poems in the language.

What Prince's Collected Poems reveals is the sheer copiousness and variety of his achievement, which includes conventional stanzaic lyrics, reflective poems on historical themes, a sequence in "open" form and another in a stanza borrowed from Shelley, an experiment with Bridges's twelve-syllable measure, and several ambitious meditative monologues. Whatever the mode, Prince's hand is deft and firm, but his most memorable work lies in his monologues, where the romantic and scholarly lineaments of his sensibility, the leisured ease and elegance of his style, can find their fullest expression. (pp. 105-06)

Prince's lyric grace can be seen in one of his earliest poems … ["To A Man on His Horse"]. To a familiar genre...
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