Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…
“By passing out into the non-human world, the life of trees and flowers and animals, man could get rid of his devouring egoism, his belittling self-aggrandisement, realise his true place in the universe, and be braced thereby and fortified.”