Laurence Binyon - Post-war Life

Post-war Life

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. His 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, yet in 1933 he retired from the British Museum. He went to live in the country at Westridge Green, near Streatley (where his daughters also came to live during the Second World War). He continued further writing poetry.

In 1933–1934, Binyon was appointed Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. 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 forced to leave, narrowly escaping before the German invasion of Greece in April 1941.

Binyon had been friends with Ezra Pound since around 1909, and in the 1930s the two became especially friendly—Pound affectionately called him "BinBin", and closely assisted Binyon with his Dante translation work. Another Binyon protégé was Arthur Waley, whom Binyon employed at the British Museum. Binyon also introduced Robert Frost to the young Robert Bridges.

Between 1933 and 1943, Binyon published an acclaimed translation of Dante's Divina commedia in an English version of terza rima. Its readership was dramatically increased when Paolo Milano selected it as the translation to be used by Viking's Portable library series, for the volume "The Portable Dante". 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 being replaced by the Mark Musa translation in 1981. At his death he was also 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 at Dunedin Nursing Home, Bath Road, Reading on 10 March 1943 after an operation. A funeral service was held at Trinity College Chapel, Oxford on the afternoon of 13 March 1943.

There is a slate memorial at Aldworth, St. Mary's Church, where Binyon's ashes were scattered after death. On 11 November 1985, Binyon was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."