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Article: Meeting George Orwell.(Ryan)
- Article from:
- Quadrant
- Article date:
- May 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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NOT LONG TURNED EIGHTEEN, I set off for the wars in New Guinea with a square, mysterious object poking its corners against the canvas at the bottom of my kitbag. (That's the soldier's capacious sausage-bag, not his back-pack.) Of all the improbable and impractical things to lug away campaigning, this awkward shape represented two fat books: a collection of the poems of John Masefield, and a gathering of the verses of Robert Service called Songs of a Sourdough.
Masefield, Poet Laureate for nearly forty years, lived long enough to write about Gallipoli in the Great War, and then about the Dunkirk evacuation in the Second World War. Though less widely esteemed today, ...