United States or Myanmar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Masefield is a better poet than critic. In the New York Tribune for 23 January 1916, he spoke with modesty and candour of his own work and his own aims, and no one can read what he said without an increased admiration for him. But it is difficult to forgive him for talking as he did about Wordsworth, who "wrote six poems and then fell asleep."
Masefield describes, with much power, the young artist's ambition, his rough handling by the uncouth sailors, and his perilous experiences while rounding Cape Horn. Dauber exhibits the poet's power of vividly picturing human figures and landscapes.
Some of the best poetry, full of the fascination of a dreamy far-off world, has been written by the Celtic poets, Yeats, Russell, and Fiona Macleod. Masefield and Gibson have produced much realistic verse about the life of the common toiler. Noyes has written Drake, a romantic epic, and a large amount of graceful lyrical verse, in some of which there is much poetic beauty.
Masefield, that robust and versifying sailor, is as irritable as a man with a bad cold. Our poets and our thinkers do not view the world with a settled gaze either of appreciation or of contempt: they look at it with the wild eye of a man who cannot imagine where he has put his gloves. Their condemnations and suggestions are alike undignified, whirling and flimsy.
we feel that he is only lengthening into a measured line the "My God, how beautiful it is!" of prose. A line like this, indeed, is merely prose that has learned the goose-step of poetry. Perhaps one would not resent it and many others like it so much if it were not that Mr. Masefield so manifestly aims at realism of effect.
Although the poem Dauber is a true story for there was such a man, who suffered both horrible fear within and brutal ridicule without, who finally conquered both, and who, in the first sweets of victory, as he was about to enter upon his true career, lost his life by falling from the yardarm cannot help thinking that Mr. Masefield put a good deal of himself into this strange hero.
Delicacy of fancy, a freedom from any touch of impurity, a beauty as of "dew-sweet moon-flowers glimmering white through the mirk of a dust laden with sea-mist," are the qualities of Fiona Macleod's best verse. John Masefield.
Masefield Tennyson is usually weak, which ought to have taught him never to venture into drama. Nothing is worse in Enoch Arden than passages like these: "Annie, this voyage by the grace of God Will bring fair weather yet to all of us. Keep a clean hearth and a clear fire for me, For I'll be back, my girl, before you know it."
And when we come to the ordinary man who goes to the front in time of war, such as the farmer described by John Masefield in his elegy, August, 1914, who looks with fond eyes upon his furrowed fields, his barns, his hay-ricks, his "friendly horses" "The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen * The fields of home, the byres, the market towns"
In the last year of his life, being asked by an American if he had been much in Athens, he replied contritely, "Thou stick'st a dagger in me." He belied Goethe's famous dictum. John Masefield was born at Ledbury, in western England, in 1874.
Word Of The Day