Professor F. T. Prince

Frank Templeton Prince, poet and English scholar: born Kimberley, South Africa 13 September 1912; Lecturer, Department of English, Southampton University 1946-57, Professor of English 1957-74 (Emeritus); Professor of English, University of the West Indies, Jamaica 1975-78; President, English Association 1985-86; married 1943 Elizabeth Bush (two daughters); died Southampton 7 August 2003.

F. T. Prince was a poet of great distinction and his work, in all its complex beauty and enigmatic power, has been admired by many poets of quality: Donald Davie and Geoffrey Hill, John Ashbery and Stanley Moss, Roy Fuller and J. H. Prynne, Lee Harwood and Anthony Howell, to name only four pairs who could not be more different from each other. T. S. Eliot too greatly admired Prince (or rather the young Prince), and published poems in The Criterion before bringing out his first book, Poems, at Faber and Faber in 1938, when Prince was 26.

The young man thus joined that precocious trio, George Barker, David Gascoyne and Dylan Thomas, as a very promising "first-volumed" poet of the half-generation following Auden and Spender. "A degree of semantic and rhythmic intelligence, so alert that it is practically tactile, constitutes the peculiar virtues of Poems," wrote Geoffrey Hill.

Non-professional readers of poetry know one poem which is in every anthology of 20th-century British poetry, "Soldiers Bathing", and which, along with Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts", is undoubtedly the most famous English-language poem of the Second World War; rightly so, for it was and remains a singularly moving portrayal of passive suffering. Prince's Christianity and deep knowledge of art are drawn on in this characteristically sinuous work (written in 1942 and first published in More Poems from the Forces, 1943) - its energy generated by powerful rhythmic circuits, its perfectly judged/intuited rhymes serving as morphological punctuation, its very syntax meshing what one might call the prose categories of beauty, compassion, ordeal and revelation:

The sea at evening moves across the sand.

Under a reddening sky I watch the freedom of a band

Of soldiers who belong to me. Stripped bare

For bathing in the sea, they shout and run in the warm air;

Their flesh, worn by the trade of war, revives

And in my mind towards the meaning of it strives.

All's pathos now. The body that was gross,

Rank, ravenous, disgusting in the act or in repose,

All fever, filth and sweat, its bestial strength

And bestial decay, by pain and labour grows at length

Fragile and luminous . . .

Getting your poetry published is not always a simple matter. After his 1938 Faber volume and six years' army service in the Intelligence Corps, in Bletchley and Cairo, Prince did not publish another volume until 1954; then, having been dropped by T.S. Eliot, he went "out of sheer perversity" (in his own words) to the egregious R.A. Caton at the Fortune Press, who brought out the eponymous volume Soldiers Bathing.

The same year saw publication by the Clarendon Press at Oxford of Prince's brilliant and seminal critical work The Italian Element in Milton's Verse ("one of the few still essential works of literary scholarship and criticism produced during the last half-century" - Geoffrey Hill). After 10 years as a lecturer and on the strength of this short book, he was appointed Professor of English in 1957 at Southampton University, where he presided until retirement in 1974. His soft-spoken and unshowy manner in conjunction with his ability to raise what he needed, at an appropriate level, from the wells of his deep and wide erudition, meant that his lectures were classics of their kind. In particular, the best students were in his debt, and knew it.

During this period he and Elizabeth (a faculty wife to the manner born) raised their family of two daughters. Reserved, conservative, demanding, dry as he was, his outer character was offset and counterbalanced by his ebullient, liberal and talkative partner. Their marriage was symbiosis incarnate.

Following Soldiers Bathing, Prince's next volume of poetry was the handsomely produced The Doors of Stone, published by a fan, Rupert Hart-Davis, in 1963. Three years earlier Prince had edited a new Arden edition of Shakespeare's poems. Various editions of Milton, too, were published, later dismissed by Prince as "mere potboilers".

In 1970 Prince's involvement with small presses began. It is surely emblematic of one aspect of our literary culture - the marginalisation of most non-populist poetry - that, from then on, such an important and truly significant poet's books have been published outside the commercial mainstream. Thus, Fulcrum Press published the first of the small-press pamphlets in 1970, Memoirs in Oxford. Then, in 1974, with some pride and conscious of the honour and responsibility, I inherited Prince from Fulcrum, and my Menard Press published his next two pamphlet-length poems - Drypoints of the Hasidim (1975) and Afterword on Rupert Brooke (1976). In 1979, lacking the resources to go it alone but deeply reluctant to let go, I co-published, with Anvil Press, Prince's first Collected Poems. A new edition appeared from Carcanet Press in 1993.

Concerning the inheritance from Fulcrum Press: I happened to be visiting Fulcrum's proprietors, Stuart and Deirdre Montgomery, at their Bloomsbury flat near Indica Bookshop (run by Barry Miles, who went on to write books about the Beats). They had come to realise they were not in a position to publish Drypoints of the Hasidim. I read the manuscript and knew immediately I must publish this ravishingly beautiful long poem.

As editor, too, of the magazine European Judaism, I was intrigued to discover that Prince, born in South Africa in 1912, was a professing Roman Catholic (with Presbyterian and Jewish parents - he was educated by the Christian Brothers in Kimberley, studying architecture at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, before settling on English at Balliol College, Oxford). In that capacity - that is, my own and his - I invited him to write an essay on the genesis of the poem.

Prince and I corresponded quite regularly while he was teaching in the University of the West Indies in the late 1970s, the first of several appointments following his retirement. (He also taught in the United States and North Yemen.) Last year, while preparing a collection of 90th birthday tributes to him for the magazine Poetry Nation Review, I reread our correspondence with much nostalgia and recalled with gratitude his wisdom and humour and kindness. Here, however, are three extracts about poetry:

A poem can sometimes follow a simple intense emotion (more often painful than not), even if it doesn't seem to be directly related. And the ability to go on writing from time to time has to be paid for instantly by instalments of anxiety or misery. Am I cheering you up? (16 October 1977)

I always have time for poetic ferment, but most of it is inconclusive and it would be absurd to give any account of it. Poets should keep their mouths shut - except in their poetry; if that is any good, nothing else matters. (8 February 1978)

I really can't make much of them [i.e. certain poets]; and wonder why they make anything of me. Not that I don't like to be liked, but both my strength and my burden is that I have to make sense - I can't make any of them. (14 March 1977)

In his early critical book Articulate Energy (1955), the poet Donald Davie praised Prince's poem "An Epistle to a Patron" lavishly, concluding: "And so this splendid poem goes on. There is no reason why it should ever stop." "Every reason," Prince told me. "It has a beginning, a middle and an end." But the comment by Davie, a poet Prince could otherwise make much of, hints at the reason why the New York School and later the so-called language poets in the same city have such a high opinion of Prince.

"An Epistle to a Patron", first published in The Criterion in 1935, works through elaborate and sophisticated patterns of syntax rather than brilliance of metaphor. It is the poetry of a man who is deeply read in Henry James and Proust, written in their template. It incarnates the way reality is created in language, without denying human truth and experience beyond and without the verbal.

The later long poems, however, tell their stories in a lucid and transparent way, having internalised the rhetoric and buried the rich web of syntactic imbrication found in the early work. The codes now lie below the surface, as in a word processor. The work antedating The Doors of Stone - "The Old Age of Michelangelo", for example - is not the less personally revealing, for all the use of personae and masks: public faces in private places, to coin a phrase. Prince, contrary to some received opinion, is a passionate poet.

Frank Prince gave the prestigious Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1972-73, but no one has been allowed to read them, let alone publish them. In 1982 he received the E.M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Fragment Poetry, his presidential address to the English Association in 1986, was given entirely in verse.

Prince's art, which will outlive fashionable, louder and better-known poets and which his devoted readers (fan club is the phrase, even though the register would make him wince) deeply cherish, stands out as an exemplary case of "fullness, meaning, not fragments".

Last, full

Meanings are out of fashion;

But there is a devil,

A good devil, at work in poetry,

Who will toil, toil on to damn

Himself, and save us from ourselves.

The art itself will try and cry for

Fullness, meaning, not fragments,

Like Blake who in the Proverbs of Hell

Cried for "Enough! Or Too Much."

Anthony Rudolf