About John Masefield
John Edward Masefield (1 June 1878 – 12 May 1967) was a British poet and novelist, who served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967. He was also a Member of the Order of Merit. His first collection of poems, “Saltwater Ballads”, published in 1902, depicts life at sea and in distant lands in a gritty, realistic style and established Masefield's reputation as a chronicler of sailors and vagrants. From this collection, the poem “Sea Fever,” an homage to the classic work The Seafarer, has found its way into English school textbooks and the literary canon. Several poems from the collection have been set to music by John Ireland, Rebecca Clarke, and Gerard Boedijn.At the age of 24, Masefield's poems were published in periodicals, as were his first works. He then wrote the novels Captain Margaret (1908) and Multitude and Solitude (1909). He soon became known to the public and celebrated by critics. Between 1911 and 1913, he published an epic poem each year: “The Everlasting Mercy”, about the conversion of a poacher and drunkard; “The Widow in the Byestreet”, about a young man who fails in love and his despairing mother; and “The Dauber”, about an amateur painter who cannot capture the reality of the sea on canvas. A seminal study of the life and work of William Shakespeare also appeared in 1911. These works led to Masefield's election to the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature in 1913.
In 1919, his vivid narrative poem describing the fox hunt, “Reynard the Fox”, was published. In the following years, Masefield experimented with dramatic works and wrote two mystically influenced children's books, “The Midnight Folk” and “The Box of Delights” (adapted by the BBC). He also wrote several realistic adventure novels, such as “The Bird of Dawning” (1933), and two further works on war themes: “Gallipoli” (1916) and “The Nine Days Wonder” (1941), about the Battle of Dunkirk.
By the 1920s, Masefield was considered an accomplished writer. His family had settled on Boar's Hill, a fairly rural area not far from Oxford, where he took up beekeeping. From 1924 until the beginning of the Second World War, he published 12 novels in a wide variety of genres: sea stories, social novels about modern England, tales of an imaginary land in Central America, and stories for children. Also in 1930, he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Masefield received the Order of Merit from King George V and numerous honorary degrees from British universities. In 1937, elected president of the Society of Authors, Masefield encouraged the continued development of English literature and poetry. John Masefield died on May 12, 1967, at the age of 88 and is buried in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.
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On his appointment as poet laureate, The Times newspaper said of him: ... his poetry could touch to beauty the plain speech of everyday life.
