Poems And Ballads By John Mansfield

Ah, Poems and Ballads (1920) by John Masefield — a title that sounds as though it should be read aloud beside a roaring fire while someone in tweed mutters approvingly and a decanter circulates with quiet authority.

Published by Elkin Mathews, a house that specialised in the sort of literary seriousness that makes modern paperbacks feel like fizzy drinks, this edition comes from a print run of fourteen thousand copies. Fourteen thousand! A number that suggests genuine ambition in 1920 — not quite Dickensian mass production, but certainly more than a poet scribbling verses on the back of a ship’s manifest and hoping for the best.

And Masefield, of course, was exactly the sort of poet who might plausibly have done that. Sailor, wanderer, future Poet Laureate, and owner of one of the most gloriously seaworthy literary reputations of the early twentieth century, he wrote poems that smell faintly of salt spray, tarred rope, tobacco, and melancholy sunsets. If poetry ever had a maritime department, Masefield would have been its harbour master.

Inside these pages you will find the kind of verse that once populated school anthologies and drawing-room recitations — ballads that stride along confidently, poems that believe rhythm and narrative are perfectly respectable things for poetry to possess, and lines that feel as though they ought to be declaimed rather than silently scanned.

This particular copy, now offered in Good condition, has survived a century of reading, shelving, moving house, ignoring, rediscovering, and perhaps the occasional moment of earnest literary enthusiasm. Like most books that reach the venerable age of one hundred, it carries itself with the calm dignity of something that has quietly outlived several literary fashions, two world wars, and more experimental poetry movements than anyone really asked for.

There is something quietly reassuring about a volume like this. It belongs to a time when poetry could still be printed in respectable quantities, when readers bought books of verse without irony, and when publishers believed that fourteen thousand people might genuinely want a collection of poems about the sea, adventure, and the occasional reflective moment.

Today, of course, the world has changed. Poetry now lives online, in spoken word events, or in mysterious Instagram squares accompanied by photographs of foggy hills. But Masefield remains stubbornly anchored in the older tradition — a poet who believed poems should sound like poems, preferably with a bit of wind in the rigging.

So here it is: a century-old collection of verse from a poet who sailed, wandered, and wrote with enviable confidence, preserved in solid book form and now happily drifting into the slightly eccentric but entirely respectable harbour of Crappy Old Books.

Fourteen thousand copies were printed.

A surprising number have vanished into time.

This one, rather admirably, has not.

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