page_title: Laurence Binyon
section_title: Later life
hierarchical_section_title: Laurence Binyon / Later life
caption_attribution_description: English: Laurence Binyon.
context_page_description: Robert Laurence Binyon, CH was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. Born in Lancaster, England, his parents were Frederick Binyon, a clergyman, and Mary Dockray. He studied at St Paul's School, London and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1891. He worked for the British Museum from 1893 until his retirement in 1933. In 1904 he married the historian Cicely Margaret Powell, with whom he had three daughters, including the artist Nicolete Gray.
  Moved by the casualties of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, Binyon wrote his most famous work "For the Fallen", which is often recited at Remembrance Sunday services in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. In 1915, he volunteered as a hospital orderly in France and afterwards worked in England, helping to take care of the wounded of the Battle of Verdun. He wrote about these experiences in For Dauntless France. After the war, he continued his career at the British Museum, writing numerous books on art.
  He was appointed Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1933. Between 1933 and his death in 1943, he published his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.
context_section_description: After the war, he returned to the British Museum and wrote numerous books on art, in particular on William Blake, Persian art, and Japanese art. His work on ancient Japanese and Chinese cultures offered strongly-contextualised examples that inspired, among others, the poets Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. Binyon's work on Blake and his followers kept alive the then nearly-forgotten memory of the work of Samuel Palmer. Binyon's duality of interests continued the traditional interest of British visionary Romanticism in the rich strangeness of Mediterranean and Oriental cultures.
  In 1931, his two-volume Collected Poems appeared. In 1932, Binyon rose to be the Keeper of the Prints and Drawings Department, but in 1933, he retired from the British Museum. He went to live in the country at Westridge Green, near Streatley, Berkshire, where his daughters also came to live during the Second World War, and he continued to write poetry.
  In 1933–1934, Binyon was appointed Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. He delivered a series of lectures on The Spirit of Man in Asian Art, which were published in 1935. Binyon continued his academic work. In May 1939, he gave the prestigious Romanes Lecture in Oxford on Art and Freedom, and in 1940, he was appointed the Byron Professor of English Literature at University of Athens.  He worked there until he was forced to leave, narrowly escaping the German invasion of Greece in April 1941 . He was succeeded by Lord Dunsany, who held the chair in 1940–1941.
  Binyon had been friends with Pound since around 1909, and in the 1930s, the two became especially close; Pound affectionately called him "BinBin" and assisted Binyon with his translation of Dante. Another protégé was Arthur Waley, whom Binyon employed at the British Museum.
  Between 1933 and 1943, Binyon published his acclaimed translation of Dante's Divine Comedy in an English version of terza rima, made with some editorial assistance by Ezra Pound. He dedicated twenty years on his translation and finished it shortly before his death. Its readership was dramatically increased when Paolo Milano selected it for "The Portable Dante" in Viking's Portable Library series. Binyon significantly revised his translation of all three parts for the project, and the volume went through three major editions and eight printings (while other volumes in the same series went out of print) before it was replaced by the Mark Musa translation in 1981.
  During the Second World War, Binyon continued to write poetry including a long poem about the London Blitz, "The Burning of the Leaves", which is regarded by many to be his masterpiece. In 2016, Paul O'Prey edited a new selection of his poems, Poems of Two Wars, which brought together the poems written during both wars, with an introductory essay on Binyon's work that makes the case for his later poetry to be considered as his best.
  At his death, Binyon was working on a major three-part Arthurian trilogy, the first part of which was published after his death as The Madness of Merlin (1947).
  He died in Dunedin Nursing Home, Bath Road, Reading, on 10 March 1943, aged 73, after an operation. A funeral service was held at Trinity College Chapel, Oxford, on 13 March 1943.
  There is a slate memorial in St. Mary's Church, Aldworth, where Binyon's ashes were scattered. On 11 November 1985, Binyon was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. The inscription on the stone quotes a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity".
caption: Laurence Binyon
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