Stuart Sherman

“ To Masefield I think that the most beautiful and exulting thing in the world—the fairest form into which our transitory lives can flame, rushing into darkness—is the courage of men who have been faithful unto death. ”

“ There are pages of particularly beautiful descriptions of the English countryside. "It always seems to me a most moving thing that natural beauty, the running water, the coming of the flowers of the spring, and the singing of birds should go on year after year with so little apparent change and with so little apparent passion while men change and do themselves such wrong in the same scene and subject to the same season," Masefield says, in speaking of the poem which so beautifully portrays the contrast of man's turbulent spirit with the serene beauty of nature. ”

“ The poetry that springs from emotion, not the intellectual exercise. In that conception of his art John Masefield has been unswerving: the beauty of ships that has moved him, the sea's power, the soul of man fighting in the last ditch—his emotional response to such as these has been finely tempered, of ringing honesty, and fired with the spark that brings a glow to the minds of other men. ”

“ The last line of this poem has been rather often quoted: "The days that make us happy make us wise." There is a good bit of Masefield in it. It is happiness, peace, and beauty which give a man new eyes and put "compassion" into his work. Yes, but reverse the saying and you have the other half of the poet's wisdom: "The days that make us wise make us happy."
In this world, a wise man learns to derive a great part of his happiness from discovering how much misery he can endure, how tough the human heart is, the blows it can take and still fight on, the wounds it can receive and still recover. ”

“ It has the relish for rough life and the gusts of Smollet. Life has been poured into the pages of this book in beautiful prose, in which Masefield has caught up the clash of human passion and the loveliness and fierce beauty of nature. ”

“ English girls with roses in their cheeks; jockeys, farmers, hucksters, peasantry—all the countryside—gayly assembling for the old English sports, the fox hunt, the horse race, the travelling circus. Here are the bright speed, the galloping rhythms, the brilliant colors, the odor and zest of ruddy life. ”

“ In 1921 came King Cole, a delightful story of circus life in a poem of quiet beauty and singular charm. Masefield has the legendary King Cole return as a spiritual force to help a struggling circus folk. "In my poem I made him help a travelling circus, because I feel that the duty of Kingship is to encourage all the arts which add joy to life. In the circus, it seems to me that one finds all the elements of the noble arts, based, as they must be, on physical development, a lively sense of life, and a kindling, compelling quality of personality. Circus artists are true artists. ”

“ Whether it be Pompey the Great, going to his death on the shores of Pelusium in Egypt, or the Samurai of The Faithful laying down their lives out of loyalty, the informing spirit is the same.
It is natural that a poet who is deeply sensitive to the potential greatness in human nature should seek ardently for some assurance that man is not playing his part in a meaningless rigmarole. ”

“ Here in the interpretation through the medium of an alien tongue of the music and ideals of one poet by another, we have that transformation which is the object but too often the despair of translation. ”

“ Of them all, to this reviewer, Masefield's is the fullest-toned, the deepest. He has remained sensitive to the tradition of English poetry, but he has never been circumscribed by it. His foundations rest unshakably upon it, but he has done his own building. None knows better than himself how much he owes to the great singers who have preceded him; he does not pose as the beneficiary of a special dispensation. ”

“ Men will give of themselves again as they have before, to the last spurt of energy, to the last drop of blood.
In the idealism of which human nature is capable, whether in blindly serving unworthy ends or not, one finds John Masefield's sympathies always passionately enlisted. ”

“ Good God, Heseltine, it seems to me that a man should not be permitted to write a play before he has risked his life for another, or for the state."
Masefield's long narrative poem, Dauber, is ordinarily praised as a superb picture of the sea. It is that, but it is more than that. It is a superb picture of artistic dedication. It illustrates the author's sense of the means by which a moribund art may live again. Here is a man who desires to paint the "windy, green, unquiet sea," ships scudding before the wind, and the destinies of men whose ways are on the great deep. ”

“ He is a more vital poet than Hardy, a more thoughtful poet than Kipling, a more virile poet than Yeats. His great lines are many, and there are many great and memorable poems. As a dramatist, he possesses a quiet depth that is perhaps the mark also of the great poet rather than the dramatic genius ”

“ Masefield's apprentice debt to Kipling in Salt Water Ballads and to Synge in The Tragedy of Nan was soon stricken off the score. The mature Masefield is nobody's echo. He is a figure as independent and original as any man can be who works, as all the great English poets have done, for the vital continuation of an ancient and splendid tradition. ”

“ He loves the taste of his own days, bitter and sweet, and his physical immersion in experience: swimming, racing, the first glimpse of strange mountains; but heavy labor, too, in quarry and mill, roads tramped in the rain, the rough talk of peasant and sailor, the long road westward through the springing wheat, the comradeship of hard-palmed men following the sea. ”

“ Of these two remarkable poems Masefield tells us: "In The Everlasting Mercy a violent man is made happy; in The Widow in the Bye Street a good woman is made unhappy. In neither case does the event fall by merit or demerit, but by the workings of Fate, which come into human affairs with the effect of justice done, for reasons not apparent to us."
In 1913 he again aroused the enthusiasm and acclaim of the critics. This time with Dauber—that magnificent "spiritual vision of life." "'Dauber' is a great poem. ”

“ By laurence stallings We learn from time to time that the Englishmen are all dead. Some fomenting soul hints darkly that Anglophiles are poring over English tripe at the reviewing stand. Bennett and Wells and Galsworthy are dead upon their feet; old age has overtaken Hardy ”

“ I know what the voguish critics are saying that—Masefield began with echoes of Kipling and Synge; that he spells Beauty with a capital letter; that the introduction of "closhy puts" and bar-room oaths into verse is no great feat once the trick has been suggested; that the tragedies are melodramatic through inadequate characterization; that the narratives are prolix ”

“ But that a poet suggests such comparisons, while writing with sharp realism of his own times and out of his own experience, marks him not a slave but an heir.
Some of these exceptions, however, are well taken, and Mr. Masefield himself would probably sustain them. In the heat of the race, he has not always avoided knocking the top-rail off the fence. In his brief introduction to this edition, glancing back over the performance of his generations, he says: "Often their work has been harsh, violent, and ill-considered." ”

“ One is tempted to say that the sensitive author of the sonnets and the lyrics, full of haunting cries and gushes of poignant sadness, has tossed his melancholy and the heartbreak of the animula into the west wind, and has voided the chamber of his personality in order to fill it with the ancient traditional emotions of the folk. ”

“ Imagination is a moral quality." Before he settles down to a literary life, Roger wishes to get the whole of himself involved and incandescent in the flame of his imagination. "I begin to think that a writer without character, without high and austere character, in himself, and in the written image of himself, is a panderer, a bawd, a seller of Christ. ”

“ In its final essence, greatness in poetry, as far as current poets are concerned, is certainly a matter of personal preference. There are those who find, in some of Masefield, swinging rhythms that mark him for them as "popular." ”

“ At this time he was also experimenting with the drama, and in 1909 The Tragedy of Nan, a poignant, powerful play in three acts, was published. Many critics have agreed that this is a masterpiece. It is an intense portrayal of tragic events in the life of simple country folk, and has been successfully performed in England. In his preface to the play Masefield says: "Tragedy at its best is a vision of the heart of life. The heart of life can only be laid bare in the agony and exultation of dreadful acts. ”

“ Masefield has, I suspect, steadied himself by leaning heavily on the joy of people who do not think and feel deeply. In Reynard the Fox, Right Royal and King Cole—outstanding narrative poems of these later years—friendly critics have hailed a recovery of that fluent, exuberant, creative energy, objective, dramatic, and sensuous, which first astonished and delighted them in The Everlasting Mercy. ”

“ A fall from the masthead kills him before he fulfills his mission. Masefield tells us that the poem is based on fact, and "Thinking of him after many years, he seems to me to be typical of the artist, who in every age will obey the laws of his being and speak his message, in spite of every disadvantage, and in contempt of death." ”

“ His study of Gallipoli is absent—that long, straight flight of writing which preserves forever still another crowd of bright and deathless figures on the beaches near Troy. One recalls fugitive other pieces. ”

“ They live apart in hardship and anxiety in order to do the artist's task, which is to awaken a sense of life in their fellows."
The Dream and Other Poems (1922) contains the poet's beautiful tribute to his friend, the late Charles Daniel, for many years Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. The title poem, Masefield tells us, is based on an actual dream.
Again Masefield returned to the field of drama, and during the next few years several plays, marked with his peculiar power of beautiful interpretation, were published. ”

“ Out of that nationalism of his came the noblest utterance in poetry that the War brought forth. If Masefield had written nothing else besides "August, 1914," his name would be remembered among the English poets. No blustering patriot, no facile glorifier of war, wrote those lines. If men died for love of England they also ”

“ A Mainsail Haul. 1914 Tragedy of Pompei the Great. Philip the King. 1915 John M. Synge (out of print) . The Faithful. Good Friday and Other Poems. 1916 Sonnets (special edition, autographed; out of print) . Captain Margaret. Gallipoli. The Tragedy of Nan. Illustrated edition 1921. The Locked Chest and The Sweeps of Ninety-Eight. Multitude and Solitude. 1917 The Lost Endeavor. Lollingdown Downs and Other Poems. 1918 Rosas (special limited edition; out of print) . The War and the Future. ”

“ The Taking of Helen. 1924 Sard Harker. 1925 The Trial of Jesus. 1925 Collected Poems and Plays (four volumes) . 1925 A Sailors Garland (imported; previously published in England ) . Sea Life in Nelson's Time (imported; previously published in England) . On the Spanish Main (imported; previously published in England) . ”