On reading Soldiers Bathing, E. M. Forster claimed it was one of the three most outstanding books to have appeared in England in 1954. In general, however, knowledge of the work of F.T. Prince has been confined to other poets, the best of whom have repeatedly called his lyrical talent as fine as that of the most accomplished of modern poets. Long intervals between publications--one of the conditions of his level of workmanship--have no doubt delayed his recognition by a wider audience.

Frank Templeton Prince was born at Kimberley in South Africa, into a provincial bourgeois setting. His parents, Henry and Margaret Hetherington Prince, a businessman and a teacher, were English. Extremely important to all he was and would become was his mother, even though they saw little of one another in later years. He later wrote in the long poem Memoirs in Oxford (1970):

But I must thank...