Prince's 50 years of work collected here is marked by a sensuous, even painful observation of nature. Prince (b. 1912 in South Africa) masters the neo-Romantic English poetic style to reveal emotional depths beneath the polished surfaces of these elegant poems. The ordeal of his narrators' creativity mirrors a search for stable identity in a world in which nature is "supple and subtle, full of stirrings." His signature poem, "Soldiers Bathing," mingling Rupert Brooke-like bitterness at war's "death and animality" with appreciation of innocence and redemption, is a memorable poem about the "terror" of love, a rich interpretation of "a drunkenness/ Of high desire and thought" and nature "luminous as a grapeskin." A poetic technique meticulous as hand-tooled leather seeks to free "mind/Impelled by torment" of "the coming of a dream." A significant body of modern poetry.
- Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
| LoC Classification |
PR9369.3.P74A17 1979 |
| Dewey |
821/.9/12 |
| Nationality |
British |
| Pub Place |
New York |
| Cover Price |
$9.95 |
| No. of Pages |
205 |
| Height x Width |
8.7
inch |
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Frank Templeton Prince was a British poet and academic, known generally for the 1942 poem Soldiers Bathing which has been frequently included in anthologies. He was born in Kimberley, South Africa. His father Harry Prinz was Dutch-Jewish, his mother Scottish. He was educated at the Christian Brothers College there, then Balliol College, Oxford. He had a visiting position at Princeton University. In World War II he was involved in intelligence work.
Possibly the most unappreciated poetic genius of our time, F. T. Prince, a Renaissance scholar who has published many works on Shakespeare and Milton in particular, is a master of language and style whose traditional forms, including the rarely seen Old- English-based technique of flyting, provide the backdrop for veritable poetic vision
