John Masefield was one of the most successful, prolific, popular and long-lived writers of the twentieth century. W.B. Yeats told him ‘You’ll be a popular poet – you’ll be riding in your carriage and pass me in the gutter’,1 and although Yeats was wrong about his own reputation he accurately identified a number of aspects about a youthful Masefield.
Masefield’s early contemporary public were to buy his novels, plays, children’s books, histories and poetry in huge numbers. His financial position, resulting from popularity, would not have prompted the writer to choose Yeats’ extravagant mode of transport, however. Masefield’s first book had opened with an emphatic rejection of ‘princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers’ and Masefield’s poetic manifesto clearly states that he will write of ‘the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!’
Masefield was born on 1 June 1878 in Ledbury, Herefordshire.2 His early childhood was idyllic, and the beauty of the local countryside, together with a dreamy imagination, led to a quasi-Wordsworthian communion with Nature. This ‘paradise’3 was not to last: Masefield was orphaned and entrusted to the guardianship of an aunt and uncle. His guardians hoped that training for the merchant marine would dispel aspirations to become a writer, and between 1891 and 1894 Masefield was educated aboard the Mersey school-shipConway. In Liverpool, sight of theWanderer, a four-masted barque, was a profound experience: it was to be a recurrent symbol throughout his work. As an apprentice, Masefield sailed round Cape Horn in 1894, but became violently ill. Classified a Distressed British Sailor he returned to England. A new position was secured for the youth aboard a ship in New York but although Masefield crossed the Atlantic he failed to report for duty. He later noted ‘I deserted my ship in New York… and cut myself adrift from her, and from my home. I was going to be a writer, come what might.’4 Homeless vagrancy ensued and became the basis for a lifelong sympathy with the underdog. Eventually, bar and factory work ended in 1897 when Masefield returned to England and started work in London as a bank clerk. Plagued by illhealth, the would-be poet achieved success in 1899 with the publication of his first poem inThe Outlook.5
Masefield saw himself as a
