"Prince's 50 years of work collected here is marked by a sensuous, even painful observation of nature. Prince 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."—Library Journal
"Undervalued at home and abroad, F.T. Prince ranks with Auden and Spender as one of the major English poets of his generation."—John Ashbery,
Description
Collected Poems: 1935-1992 contains the life work of the great English outsider poet F. T. Prince. Often working in forms that are deceptively traditional, Prince has a special genius for the lost and often unseen details of experience. His presence has been felt by a succession of English and American poets who, despite their working in more open forms, often arrive at a terrain already occupied by him. Selected by Harold Bloom as part of his canon of world literature.
About the Author
Born in South Africa in 1912 and educated at Oxford and Princeton, F. T. PRINCE has taught at the University of Southampton, and for ten years in Jamaica, and at various universities in the United States.
December 1993