John Masefield

John Edward Masefield (1 June 1878 – 12 May 1967), was a British poet and writer, and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967. He is remembered as the author of the classic children's novels The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights and a great deal of memorable poetry, including "Sea Fever", from his anthology Saltwater Ballads.

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Masefield was born at Ledbury, in Herefordshire, a rural area of England. After an education at the King's School in Warwick and on the school ship HMS Conway, he became a junior officer on an ocean liner. After being taken ill, he was forced to return home in 1897, and his literary career began. His first collection of poetry was Saltwater Ballads, published in 1902. During World War I, though old enough to be exempted from military service, he went to the Western Front as a medical orderly, later publishing his own account of his experiences. He settled in Oxford, inheriting the title of Poet Laureate from a neighbour, Robert Bridges, in 1930. However, it is generally considered that his best work was written before this date.

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He was interred in the Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.

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His poem "Sea-Fever", a homage to the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, has found its way into popular culture, especially the line "And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by":

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• the poem is used whole in a The Incredible Hulk comic book of the 1970s.
• misquoted with "sail" instead of "steer" in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971).
• the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004).
• the film "" includes a brief debate between Dr. Leonard McCoy and Mr. Spock, with McCoy being certain that Herman Melville wrote this line of poetry, and Spock being correct that it was John Masefield.
• the television series Sports Night featured a dialogue, in episode "The Hunted and the Hungry" (1.03), arguing the authorship of the poem — no one was right, and the poem was .
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