author
Laurence Binyon
1869–1943
Best remembered for the moving First World War poem "For the Fallen," he was also a gifted museum scholar who helped introduce many British readers to Asian art. His life joined poetry, criticism, and public service in a way that still feels unusually wide-ranging.
4 Audiobooks
Primavera: Poems by Four Authors
by Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Arthur Shearly Cripps, Manmohan Ghose
Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century
by Laurence Binyon
Arthur : A tragedy
by Laurence Binyon
The sirens : An ode
by Laurence Binyon
About the author
Born in Lancaster in 1869, Laurence Binyon studied at St Paul's School in London and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He went on to build a long career at the British Museum, becoming known not only as a poet and dramatist but also as an important scholar of prints, drawings, and Asian art.
Binyon wrote steadily for decades, but he is most widely remembered for For the Fallen, the 1914 poem that gave the world the line often used in remembrance services: "They shall grow not old..." That poem secured his place in literary history, yet it was only one part of a much broader body of work that included plays, criticism, and studies of painting.
What makes Binyon especially interesting is the range of his mind. He could write with deep feeling about war and loss while also shaping how British audiences understood Chinese and Japanese painting, bringing the worlds of literature and art history together in a single career. He died in 1943, leaving behind a reputation that rests on both beauty of language and serious scholarship.