Early life Masefield was born in
Ledbury,
Herefordshire, to George Masefield, a solicitor, and his wife Caroline (née Parker). He was baptised in the Church at Preston Cross, just outside Ledbury. His mother died giving birth to his sister when Masefield was six, and he went to live with his aunt. His father died soon afterwards, following a mental breakdown. After a very happy education at the
King's School in
Warwick (now known as Warwick School where he even had a building named after him), where he was a boarder between 1888 and 1891, he left to board , both to train for a life at sea and to break his addiction to reading, of which his aunt thought little. He spent several years aboard this ship, and found that he could spend much of his time reading and writing. It was aboard the
Conway that Masefield's love of story-telling grew. While he was on the ship, he listened to the stories told about sea lore, continued to read, and decided that he was to become a writer and story-teller himself. Masefield gives an account of life aboard the
Conway in his book
New Chum. In 1894 Masefield boarded the
Gilcruix, destined for Chile. This first voyage brought him the experience of sea sickness, but his record of his experiences while sailing through extreme weather shows his delight in seeing flying fish, porpoises and birds. He was awed by the beauty of nature, including a rare sighting of a
nocturnal rainbow, on this voyage. On reaching Chile, he suffered from sunstroke and was hospitalised. He eventually returned home to England as a passenger aboard a steamship. His experiences on the voyage were used as material for his narrative poem
Dauber (1913). Ten years later, Masefield wrote to Scott to tell him what reading that poem had meant to him: From 1895 to 1897, Masefield was employed at the huge Alexander Smith carpet factory in Yonkers, New York, where long hours were expected and conditions were far from ideal. He purchased up to 20 books a week, and devoured both modern and classical literature. His interests at this time were diverse, and his reading included works by
George du Maurier,
Alexandre Dumas (père),
Thomas Browne,
William Hazlitt,
Charles Dickens,
Rudyard Kipling, and
Robert Louis Stevenson.
Chaucer also became very important to him during this time, as well as
Keats and
Shelley. In 1897, Masefield returned home to England as a passenger aboard a steamship. In 1901, when Masefield was 23, he met his future wife, Constance de la Cherois Crommelin (6 February 186718 February 1960, from
Cushendun in
County Antrim,
Northern Ireland; she was a sister to
Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin), aged 35, and of Huguenot descent. They married on 23 June 1903 at St. Mary,
Bryanston Square. Educated in classics and
English Literature, and a mathematics teacher, Constance was a good match for him, despite the difference in their ages. The couple had two children: Judith, born Isabel Judith, 28 April 1904, in London, died in Sussex, 1 March 1988; and Lewis Crommelin, born in 1910, in London, killed in action in Africa, 29 May 1942. In 1902 Masefield was put in charge of the fine arts section of the Arts and Industrial Exhibition in Wolverhampton. By then his poems were being published in periodicals and his first collection of verse,
Salt-Water Ballads, was published that year. It included the poem "Sea-Fever". Masefield then wrote two novels,
Captain Margaret (1908) and
Multitude and Solitude (1909). In 1911, after a long period of writing no poems, he composed
The Everlasting Mercy, the first of his
narrative poems, and within the next year had produced two more, "The Widow in the Bye Street" and "Dauber". As a result, he became widely known to the public and was praised by the critics. In 1912 he was awarded the annual Edmond de Polignac Prize.
From the First World War to appointment as Poet Laureate When the First World War began in 1914 Masefield was old enough to be exempted from military service, but he joined the staff of a British hospital for French soldiers, the
Hôpital Temporaire d'Arc-en-Barrois in Haute-Marne, serving a six-week term during the spring of 1915. He later published an account of his experiences. At about this time Masefield moved his country retreat from Buckinghamshire to
Lollingdon Farm in
Cholsey, the setting that inspired a number of poems and sonnets under the title
Lollingdon Downs, and which his family used until 1917. After returning home, Masefield was invited to the United States on a three-month lecture tour. Although his primary purpose was to lecture on English literature, he also intended to collect information on the mood and views of Americans regarding the war in Europe. When he returned to England, he submitted a report to the
British Foreign Office and suggested that he should be allowed to write a book about the failure of the
Allied effort in the Dardanelles that might be used in the United States to counter German propaganda there. The resulting work,
Gallipoli, was a success. Masefield then met the head of
British Military Intelligence in France and was asked to write an account of the
Battle of the Somme. Although Masefield had grand ideas for his book, he was denied access to official records and what was intended to be the preface was published as
The Old Front Line, a description of the geography of the Somme area. In 1918 Masefield returned to America on his second lecture tour, spending much of his time speaking and lecturing to American soldiers waiting to be sent to Europe. These speaking engagements were very successful. On one occasion a battalion of
black soldiers danced and sang for him after his lecture. During this tour he matured as a public speaker and realised his ability to touch the emotions of his audience with his style of speaking, learning to speak publicly from his own heart rather than from dry scripted speeches. Towards the end of his visit both
Yale and
Harvard Universities conferred honorary doctorates of letters on him. in 1915 Masefield entered the 1920s as an accomplished and respected writer. His family was able to settle on
Boar's Hill, a somewhat rural setting not far from
Oxford, where Masefield took up
beekeeping, goat-herding and poultry-keeping. He continued to meet with success: the first edition of his
Collected Poems (1923) sold about 80,000 copies. A narrative poem,
Reynard The Fox (1920), has been critically compared with works by
Geoffrey Chaucer, not necessarily to Masefield's credit. This was followed by
Right Royal and
King Cole, poems in which the relationship between humanity and nature is emphasised. After
King Cole, Masefield turned away from long poems and back to novels. Between 1924 and 1939 he published 12 novels, which vary from stories of the sea (
The Bird of Dawning,
Victorious Troy) to social novels about modern England (
The Hawbucks,
The Square Peg), and from tales of an imaginary land in Central America (
Sard Harker,
Odtaa) to fantasies for children (
The Midnight Folk,
The Box of Delights). In this same period he wrote a large number of dramatic pieces. Most of these were based on Christian themes, and Masefield, to his amazement, encountered a ban on the performance of plays on biblical subjects that went back to the Reformation and had been revived a generation earlier to prevent production of Oscar Wilde's
Salome. However, a compromise was reached and in 1928 his
The Coming of Christ was the first play to be performed in an English cathedral since the Middle Ages.
Encouraging the speaking of verse In 1921 Masefield gave the British Academy's Shakespeare Lecture and received an honorary doctorate of literature from the University of Oxford. In 1923 he organised Oxford Recitations, an annual contest whose purpose was "to discover good speakers of verse and to encourage 'the beautiful speaking of poetry'". Given the numbers of contest applicants, the event's promotion of natural speech in poetical recitations, and the number of people learning how to listen to poetry, Oxford Recitations was generally deemed a success. Masefield was similarly a founding member of the
Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse in 1924. He later came to question whether the Oxford events should continue as a contest, considering that they might better be run as a festival. However, in 1929, after he broke with the competitive element, Oxford Recitations came to an end. The Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse, on the other hand, continued to develop through the influence of associated figures such as
Marion Angus and
Hugh MacDiarmid and exists today as the
Poetry Association of Scotland.
Later years In 1930, on the death of
Robert Bridges, a new
poet laureate was needed. On the recommendation of the Prime Minister,
Ramsay MacDonald,
King George V appointed Masefield, who remained in the post until his death in 1967. The only person to hold the office for a longer period was
Alfred, Lord Tennyson. On Masefield's appointment,
The Times wrote of him that "his poetry could touch to beauty the plain speech of everyday life". Masefield took his appointment seriously and produced a large quantity of poems for royal occasions, which were sent to
The Times for publication. Masefield's modesty was shown by his inclusion of a stamped and self-addressed envelope with each submission so that the poem could be returned if it was found unacceptable. Later he was commissioned to write a poem to be set to music by the
Master of the King's Musick, Sir
Edward Elgar, and performed at the unveiling of the
Queen Alexandra Memorial by the King on 8 June 1932. This was the ode
"So Many True Princesses Who Have Gone". After his appointment, Masefield was awarded the
Order of Merit by King George V and many honorary degrees from British universities. In 1937 he was elected President of the
Society of Authors. In 1938 he was awarded the
Shakespeare Prize, one of the only two such awards made by the
Hamburg-based
Alfred Toepfer Foundation before the Second World War. Masefield encouraged the continued development of English literature and poetry, and began the annual awarding of the
Royal Medals for Poetry for a first or second published edition of poems by a poet under the age of 35. Additionally, his speaking engagements called him further away, often on much longer tours, yet he still produced significant amounts of work in a wide variety of genres. To those he had already used he now added autobiography, producing
New Chum,
In the Mill, and
So Long to Learn. It was not until he was about 70 that Masefield slowed his pace, mainly due to illness. In 1960 Constance died aged 93, after a long illness. Although her death was heartrending, he had spent a tiring year watching the woman he loved die. He continued his duties as poet laureate.
In Glad Thanksgiving, his last book, was published when he was 88 years old. In late 1966 Masefield developed gangrene in his ankle. This spread to his leg and he died of the infection on 12 May 1967. In accordance with his stated wishes, he was cremated and his ashes were placed in
Poets' Corner in
Westminster Abbey. However, the following verse by Masefield was discovered later, addressed to his "Heirs, Administrators, and Assigns": ==Legacy==