Laurence Binyon

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Robert Laurence Binyon, CH (10 August 1869 – March 1943) was an English poet, dramatist, and art scholar.

Frederick Binyon, a clergyman, and Mary Dockray, both born in Lancaster, England, attended St Paul's School in London, London.

He received the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1891 at Trinity College, Oxford, Oxford.

He worked for the British Museum from 1893 to 1937, retiring in 1933.

He married historian Cicely Margaret Powell in 1904, which included artist Nicolete Gray. Binyon wrote his most popular work "For the Fallen" in 1914, which is often recited at Remembrance Sunday services in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

He served in France in 1915 and then went to England, helping the wounded of the Battle of Verdun's wounded.

In For Dauntless France, he wrote about his experiences.

After the war, he continued his work at the British Museum, authored many books on art. In 1933, he was named Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University.

He published his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy from 1933 to his death in 1943.

Several of his poems include a poem about the London Blitz, "The Burning of the Leaves," a poem that has been regarded as his masterpiece by many.

He died in Reading on March 10, 1943, aged 73, after an operation.

Early life

Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. Frederick Binyon, a clergyman of the Church of England, and Mary Dockray were his parents. Robert Benson Dockray, Mary's father, was a key engineer on the London and Birmingham Railway. Quakers were his ancestors.

Binyon attended St Paul's School in London. At Trinity College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1891, he read Classics (Honor Moderations).

Binyon began working for the British Museum's Department, primarily because of his graduation in 1893. He also wrote catalogs for the museum and art monographs for himself. In 1895, his first book, Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century, was published. Binyon joined the Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings in the same year, under Campbell Dodgson. Binyon was the company's Assistant Keeper in 1909, and he was made Keeper of the new Sub-Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings in 1913. He was instrumental in the creation of Modernism in London around the 1980s by including young Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and H.D. Visual art and literature in East Asia. Many of Binyon's books were inspired by his own aspirations as a poet, although some of the museum's English drawings and his seminal catalogue of Chinese and Japanese prints were inspired by his own personal experience.

He married historian Cicely Margaret Powell in 1904, and the pair had three children together. Binyon was a regular customer of the Vienna Café in Oxford Street during those years and was connected to a select group of artists. Ezra Pound, Sir William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert, James Rickett, Lucien Pissarro, and Edmund Dulac were among his fellow intellectuals there.

Binyon's fame before the First World War was so prominent that he was named as his likely replacement (others listed included Thomas Hardy, John Masefield, and Rudyard Kipling), but the article went to Robert Bridges).

Later life

After the war, he returned to the British Museum and authored a number of books on art, including ones on William Blake, Persian art, and Japanese art. His research into ancient Japanese and Chinese cultures inspired, among other things, poets Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. Binyon's biography on Blake and his followers revived the then-forgotten memory of Samuel Palmer's work. Binyon's dualistic interests harrassed the British visionary Romanticism's traditional interest in Mediterranean and Oriental cultures.

His two-volume Collected Poems appeared in 1931. Binyon rose to be the Keeper of the Prints and Drawings Department in 1932, but he was banned from the British Museum in 1933. He continued to live in Westridge Green, near Streatley, Berkshire, where his daughters survived during the Second World War and continued to write poetry.

Binyon was named Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1933-1934. In 1935, he delivered a series of lectures on The Spirit of Man in Asian Art, which were first published in 1935. Binyon continued his academic duties. In May 1939, he delivered the prestigious Romanes Lecture in Oxford on Art and Freedom, and in 1940, he was appointed Byron Professor of English Literature at University of Athens. He was there until he was forced to leave, barely escaping the German invasion of Greece in April 1941. He was succeeded by Lord Dunsany, who served as the chair from 1940 to 1941.

Binyon had been friends with Pound since 1909, and the two became close in the 1930s; Pound affectionately referred to him as "BinBin" and helped Binyon with his translation of Dante. Arthur Waley, who Binyon employed at the British Museum, was another protégé.

Binyon's acclaimed translation of Dante's Divine Comedy in an English version of terza rima, published with some editorial assistance from Ezra Pound between 1933 and 1943. He devoted twenty years to his translation and finished it shortly before his death. Its readership was greatly enhanced when Paolo Milano selected it for "The Portable Dante" in Viking's Portable Library series's "The Portable Dante" book. Binyon substantially revised his translation of all three parts of the project, and the book went through three major editions and eight printings (while other volumes in the same series went out of print) before being replaced by the Mark Musa translation in 1981.

Binyon continued to write poetry, including a long poem about the London Blitz, "The Burning of the Leaves," which is considered by some as his masterpiece. Paul O'Prey edited a new collection of his poems, Poems of Two Wars, which collected the poems written during both wars as well as an introduction essay on Binyon's work that should be regarded as his best in 2016.

Binyon died at his age, but it was the first part of a big three-part Arthurian trilogy that was released after his death as The Madness of Merlin (1947).

After an operation, he died in Dunedin Nursing Home, Bath Road, Reading, on March 10, 1943, at the age of 73. On March 13, 1943, a funeral service was held at Trinity College Chapel, Oxford.

In Aldworth, Berkshire, where Binyon's ashes were scattered, there is a slate memorial. Binyon was one of 16 Great War poets honored on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner on November 11, 1985. Wilfred Owen, a fellow Great War writer, is quoted in the stone's inscription. "My subject is war, and the pity of war," it says. The Poetry is in the Pity.

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