John Masefield, Selected Poems, edited by Donald Stanford (Carcanet) £7.95 pb.
John Masefield's Letters from the Front, 1915-1917 edited by Peter Vansittart (Constable) £12.50
John Masefield, Letters to Margaret Bridges, 1915-1919, edited by Donald Stanford (Carcanet) £6.95

There are some writers whose return to favour may be regarded as inherently improbable. No one, for example, is likely to want to republish the works of a poet so shallow and commonplace as the eighteenth century Mallet. In our century, a revival of interest in Alfred Austin, Austin Dobson, or Sir William Watson - who, after years of silence, was found to be still alive in 1931 - can safely be excluded. That a Stephen Phillips renaissance might be staged is perhaps just conceivable; for a residual curiosity surrounds a man who was compared in his day - and a day not so far distant - to Shakespeare. Is there likely to be a revival of interest in Masefield? The publication of a volume of selected poems and two volumes of new correspondence forces this question upon us. Indeed, it was no doubt intended to exercise such pressure. Not merely is the selection greater in bulk than that of many entire oeuvres, but Masefield had, besides fecundity, other claims to attention. He was virtually self-educated. He followed several unusual callings before taking up the profession of letters. Through anthologies, his poems, above all 'Cargoes' and 'Sea-Fever', were at one time known to almost every schoolchild in the English-speaking world. He was ...