Volume 42, Number 20 · December 21, 1995
Opening the Box of Delights
By Alison Lurie
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
A Book of Discoveries
by John Masefield
Frederick A. Stokes (out of print)
Martin Hyde: The Duke's Messenger
by John Masefield
Little, Brown (out of print)
Jim Davis
by John Masefield
Amereon Ltd, 243 pp., $20.95
The Midnight Folk
by John Masefield, illustrated by Quentin Blake
Heinemann, 212 pp., £12.99
The Box of Delights: When the Wolves Were Running
by John Masefield, illustrated by Quentin Blake
Heinemann, 288 pp., £12.99
Like many writers of his time, John Masefield outlived his reputation. Today his fiction is forgotten, and his poetry is thought to display the worst qualities of the Georgians: decorum, metrical monotony, conventional morality, and the idealization of Beauty with a capital B. Sometimes the charge of hypocrisy is added by those who know that this 'poet of the sea' was frequently seasick; and that at the age of seventeen he left the Merchant Marine, which had inspired his most famous works, and spent the rest of his life well inland.
Review, 5065 words
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