Prince, F T

▪ 2004

      South African-born British poet (b. Sept. 13, 1912, Kimberley, S.Af.—d. Aug. 7, 2003, Southampton, Eng.), created a body of original poetry characterized by long lines and a quiet, though intense, voice and best exemplified by his much-anthologized war poem “Soldiers Bathing.” Prince was born to British immigrants in South Africa and attended Christian Brothers College in Kimberley; the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; Balliol College, Oxford (B.Litt. with first-class honours, 1934); and Princeton University. The poets who influenced his early writing were W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, who, as an editor at Faber and Faber, brought out Prince's first volume of poetry, Poems (1938). Prince was a reader in English literature (1946–57) and then a professor of English (1957–74) at the University of Southampton, Eng. His famous war poem was published during World War II and again as the title poem of his second collection, published in 1954. After retiring from Southampton, he taught in Jamaica, the U.S., and North Yemen (now part of Yemen). In addition to his later volumes of poetry—notably Doors of Stone (1963) and Collected Poems (1993)—Prince wrote two autobiographical works, Memoirs of Oxford (1970) and Walks in Rome (1987), and an erudite critical work on John Milton, The Italian Element in Milton's Verse (1954).

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