F. T. Prince

Who was F. T. Prince?

Frank Templeton Prince was a British poet and academic, known generally for his best-known poem Soldiers Bathing, written during the Second World War in 1942, which has been frequently included in anthologies. He was born in Kimberley, South Africa. His father Henry Prince was from the East End of London, of Dutch-Jewish descent, while his mother was Scottish. He was educated at the Christian Brothers College in Kimberley, then Balliol College, Oxford. He had a visiting position at Princeton University. In World War II he was involved in intelligence work at Bletchley Park.

He married in 1943, and took an academic position after the war at the University of Southampton, where he settled. In the mid-1970s, he taught at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, as well as Brandeis University in the United States and Sana'a University, Yemen.

Prince's early work drew praise from T.S. Eliot, who was then editor at Faber and Faber. Eliot published some of his poetry in The Criterion before publishing Prince's first book Poems in 1938. In work such as the Afterword on Rupert Brooke his interest in the metrical ideas of Robert Bridges is evident.