Robert Laurence Binyon, CH (10 August 1869 – 10 March 1943) was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. Born in Lancaster, England, his parents were Frederick Binyon, a clergyman, and Mary Dockray. He studied at St Paul's School, London and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1891. He worked for the British Museum from 1893 until his retirement in 1933. In 1904 he married the historian Cicely Margaret Powell, with whom he had three daughters, including the artist Nicolete Gray.
Moved by the casualties of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, Binyon wrote his most famous work "For the Fallen", which is often recited at Remembrance Sunday services in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. In 1915, he volunteered as a hospital orderly in France and afterwards worked in England, helping to take care of the wounded of the Battle of Verdun. He wrote about these experiences in For Dauntless France, re-released as a centenary edition in 2018 as The Call and the Answer. After the war, he continued his career at the British Museum, writing numerous books on art.
He was appointed Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1933. Between 1933 and his death in 1943, he published his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. His war poetry includes a poem about the London Blitz, "The Burning of the Leaves", regarded by many as his masterpiece.
Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. His parents were Frederick Binyon, a clergyman of the Church of England, and Mary Dockray. Mary's father, Robert Benson Dockray, was a main engineer of the London and Birmingham Railway. His forebears were Quakers.
Binyon studied at St Paul's School, London. Then he read Classics (Honour Moderations) at Trinity College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1891.
Immediately after graduating in 1893, Binyon started working for the Department of Printed Books of the British Museum, writing catalogues for the museum and art monographs for himself. In 1895 his first book, Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century, was published. In that same year, Binyon moved into the museum's Department of Prints and Drawings, under Campbell Dodgson. In 1909, Binyon became its Assistant Keeper.
1913, he was made the Keeper of the new Sub-Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings. Around then, he played a crucial role in the formation of Modernism in London by introducing young Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and H.D. to East Asian visual art and literature. Many of Binyon's books produced at the museum were influenced by his own sensibilities as a poet although some were works of plain scholarship, such as his four-volume catalogue of all of the museum's English drawings and his seminal catalogue of Chinese and Japanese prints.
In 1904 he married historian Cicely Margaret Powell, and the couple had three daughters. During those years, Binyon belonged to a circle of artists, as a regular patron of the Vienna Café in Oxford Street. His fellow intellectuals there were Ezra Pound, Sir William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert, Charles Ricketts, Lucien Pissarro and Edmund Dulac.
Binyon's reputation before the First World War was such that on the death of the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin in 1913, Binyon was among the names mentioned in the press as his likely successor. Others named included Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Rudyard Kipling, with the post going to Robert Bridges.
Moved by the opening of what was then called the Great War and the already-high number of casualties of the British Expeditionary Force, Binyon wrote his "For the Fallen" in 1914, with its "Ode of Remembrance", the third and fourth, or simply the fourth stanza of the poem. At the time, he was visiting the cliffs on the north Cornwall coast, either at Polzeath or at Portreath. There is a plaque at each site to commemorate the event, but Binyon himself mentioned Polzeath in a 1939 interview. The confusion may be related to Porteath Farm being near Polzeath. The piece was published by The Times in September, when public feeling was affected by the recent Battle of the Marne.
Today Binyon's most famous poem, "For the Fallen", is often recited at British Remembrance Sunday services; is an integral part of Anzac Day services in Australia and New Zealand and of 11 November Remembrance Day services in Canada. The "Ode of Remembrance" has thus been claimed as a tribute to all casualties of war, regardless of nation.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,