Word: masefield
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Everyone knows Ben Jonson, Tennyson and Wordsworth, but who ever heard of Nahum Tate, Laurence Eusden, and William Whitehead? All six men share the dignity of having been poets laureate of England, a tradition that goes back 350 years. According to the 17th and most recent laureate, John Masefield, this high post "is responsible for some of the world's worst literature." Masefield died last week at 88 at the country home in Abingdon where he spent most of his time. Fortunately, he had written much of his best poetry long before George V named him laureate...
...Boozing Brutes." The son of a country lawyer, Masefield wrote roistering early verses peppered with adventures that he had packed into his teens. He went to sea as a cook, rose to the rank of master mariner, and sailed around Cape Horn. He went to the U.S., where he crossed the continent as a hobo, worked in a Greenwich Village saloon and, while employed in a Yonkers, N.Y., carpet factory, finally realized that his metier was poetry. Thus the rough, unschooled youth of 19 set out to fashion his poems not for "the portly presence of potentates goodly in girth...
Lamont himself donated collections of books and manuscripts to the University library, including the papers of his father, Thomas W. Lamont '98, and an extensive family correspondence with John Masefield, the British poet. He was vice-chairman for the $82.5-million Program for Harvard College...
Today's blue-water skippers are a bit more specific than John Masefield. Their pragmatic doggerel runs: "Give me a Cal-40 and some racing luck, and I'll win Bermuda, Transpac and Mackinac." In less than three years of ocean competition, the 40-ft. fiber-glass sloops from California have become the tallest boats in U.S. racing, sailing off with virtually every major trophy...
Hocking might not have quarreled with that description. He proudly con curred in Poet John Masefield's con tention that love and beauty are uni versal gateways to truth and agreed with Existentialist Gabriel Marcel that all of experience is a divine summons, exalting passion. He never wavered from the tenet of his first book, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), that "the world, like human self, has its unity in a living purpose. It is the truth of the existence...