John Masefield--new wine in old bottles--back to Chaucer--the self-conscious adventurer--early education and experiences--_Dauber_--Mr. Masefleld's remarks on Wordsworth--Wordsworth's famous Preface and its application to the poetry of Mr. Masefield--_The Everlasting Mercy_--_The Widow in the Bye Street_ and its Chaucerian manner--his masterpiece--_The Daffodil Fields_--similarities to Wordsworth--the part played by the flowers--comparison of _The Daffodil Fields_ with _Enoch Arden_--the war poem, _August 1914_--the lyrics--the sonnets--the novels--his object in writing--his contribution to the advance of poetry. Poets are the Great Exceptions. Poets are for ever performing the impossible. "No man putteth new wine into old bottles ... new wine must be put into new bottles." But putting new wine into old bottles has been the steady professional occupation of John Masefield. While many of our contemporary vers librists and other experimentalists have been on the hunt for new bottles, sometimes, perhaps, more interested in the bottle than in the wine, John Masefield has been constantly pouring his heady drink into receptacles five hundred years old. In subject-matter and in language he is not in the least "traditional," not at all Victorian; he is wholly modern, new, contemporary. Yet while he draws his themes and his heroes from his own experience, his inspiration as a poet comes directly from Chaucer, who died in 1400. He is, indeed, the Chaucer of today; the most closely akin to Chaucer--not only in temperament, but in literary manner--of all the writers of the twentieth century. The beautiful metrical form that Chaucer invented--rime royal--ideally adapted for narrative poetry, as shown in _Troilus and Criseyde_, is the metre chosen by John Masefield for _The Widow in the Bye Street_ and for _Dauber_; the only divergence in _The Daffodil Fields_ consisting in the lengthening of the seventh line of the stanza, for which he had plenty of precedents. Mr. Masefield owes more to Chaucer than to any other poet. Various are the roads to poetic achievement. Browning became a great poet at the age of twenty, with practically no experience of life outside of books. He had never travelled, he had never "seen the world," but was brought up in a library; and was so deeply read in the Greek poets and dramatists that a sunrise on the Aegean Sea was more real to him than a London fog. He never saw Greece with his natural eyes. In the last year of his life, being asked by an American if he had been much in Athens, he replied contritely, "Thou stick'st a dagger in me." He belied Goethe's famous dictum.