Word: masefields
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...hanging around theater exits with an autograph album and writing very polite letters to celebrities, young Fred soon got on signature terms with everyone from Arnold Bennett to George Bernard Shaw. A few literary lions headed into the deep bush when they scented Fred on their trail. Poet John Masefield, for instance, responded to Fred's advances with a "chilly" printed card, and that "awful snob" Rudyard Kipling, trapped by Fred outside a museum, "raised his stick as I raised my hat." But for the most part Fred managed to turn his literary relationships into a neat, profitable routine...
...class of a New England institution, he found the teacher "a tired woman of about 50, with heavy black eyebrows and a nasal voice . . . For an hour she leafed through a collection of verse and commented on the titles in a dry monotone. She reached the conclusion that John Masefield loved the sea, and said she liked Robert Frost because there was 'none of that falderal about him-you wouldn't know his stuff was poetry if you didn't see it printed with capital letters...
...middle age Masefield settled down to live the life of a country squire and poet emeritus on a hill overlooking Oxford. Famous poets and authors came to give readings of his works. University students bicycled up the slope to watch the plays he directed in a miniature theater built in his garden. Village neighbors thronged to his square-dance classes. When not busy with these enterprises, Masefield still kept busy writing. More than a dozen novels, including The Box of Delights (1935), Live and Kicking Ned (1939) and Bas-ilissa (1940), poured from his pen, but his great days...
Older Ages. From On the Hill, the first volume of new Masefield poems to appear since the war, the laureate's publishers have mercifully excluded their author's dutiful little odes to George VI, Franklin Roosevelt, Princess Elizabeth and young Prince Charles of Edinburgh. The 24 poems that make up the volume are echoes of a sturdier Masefield who can still spin a tale of a country prizefight, drop a tear for the rifled tomb of an old king and enjoy the sense of friendly ghosts in Hilcote Manor. They are only echoes of the Masefield of Reynard...
Since a serious case of pneumonia laid him low last April, 71-year-old John Masefield has been too ill to pursue even the gentle life he set himself at Oxford. It is unlikely that he will follow again in the future either the flags of his youth or the dreams of his middle age, but the zest that once stirred Masefield can still find counterpart in his readers even if theirs is also pretty much just habit...