PRINCE, F.T.

born Sept. 13, 1912, Kimberley, Cape Province, S.Af. in full Frank Templeton Prince British poet whose sensitive, compassionate poetry is written with precision and craftsmanship. Prince was educated at Christian Brothers College, Kimberley; Balliol College, Oxford; and Princeton University. He was appointed reader in English literature at the University of Southampton, England (1946), becoming professor of English (1957-74). He was professor of English at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (1975-78), and taught in the United States thereafter. His native South Africa offered Prince the themes for his earlier poems, but the tradition of European civilization (specifically Renaissance Italy) exerted a deeper influence on his writing. Soldiers Bathing and Other Poems (1954) is perhaps his best-known work. Acutely self-critical, Prince rejected much of his poetry; of his published work he was satisfied only with The Doors of Stone: Poems, 1938-1962 (1963), a collection of fewer than 50 poems. Prince's literary criticism includes In Defence of English (1959), William Shakespeare: The Poems (1963), and The Italian Element in Milton's Verse (1954). He published Memoirs of Oxford in verse in 1970, Drypoints of the Hasidim (1975), Afterword on Rupert Brooke (1976), Collected Poems (1979), Walks in Rome (1987), and Collected Poems, 1935-1992 (1993).