Introduction (1991)

In the 1960s I went to see Wystan Auden, and found him rewriting some of his poetry of the late 1930s. I suggested that he was overlaying his thoughts of that time with his thoughts of thirty years later. He replied that in fact he wasn’t doing any such thing. He was expressing what he had thought and felt more precisely now than he had been able to do at the time.

I thought of Auden’s words when I came to revise books like the present one on John Masefield which was a work of my maturing mind; I believe it has something of my own to offer the reader and the student of the subject. I wrote John Masefield in the years 1951– 1952. The work was published in 1953 and reissued in 1962, and I have confined myself to making more clear what I meant at the time. I was happy when the first reviewers of the book discerned that, labour of love though it was, it was honest and never fulsome.

Since this book was first published two important books on Masefield have appeared: John Masefield, A Life (1978) by Constance Babington Smith, which is an excellent and full-scale biography, and John Masefield’s England (1973) by Professor Fraser Drew, a splendid portrait of Masefield as a chronicler of England. I hope the present work, concentrating as it does on Masefield’s narrative powers, will contribute to the picture of a remarkable man and writer.

Towards the end of 1950 I was still a fairly unknown writer, a poet and critic. My poetry was moving more and more towards the narrative form. I was not yet ready to write novels. I thought in many ways that novels were a lazy way of writing poetry, and above all I didn’t want to become a ‘lady-novelist’ with all the slop and sentimentalism that went with that classification. (In that aim, at least, I have the satisfaction of having been successful.)