Sea-Fever: Selected Poems of John Masefield edited by Philip W Errington (285pp, Fyfield Books, £9.95)

"Masefield did not specialise in brevity," wrote John Betjeman (who did), introducing the huge 1978 Selected Poems of his predecessor as poet laureate. Philip W Errington's introduction to this new selection takes issue with Betjeman's critical reduction of Masefield's 62 volumes of poetry to "two lyrics which will be remembered as long as the language lasts": "Sea-Fever" and "Cargoes". On its own terms, however, Betjeman's judgment is hard to fault. Masefield wrote few other lyrics so compactly memorable. After those early sea-going songs, he considered himself a "story-teller" in the expansive mode of Chaucer. But this homely notion of poetry sold widely to one generation only: out-of-water Victorians such as Betjeman's father, who, his son noted, "despite his affection for me, was not given to reading poetry, [but] certainly read all of Masefield's long poems".

In his lifetime, then, Masefield became a poet for readers who preferred stories. Fortunately, Errington's discriminating selection of shorter pieces necessarily favours the lyrical over the narrative, and so memorialises at his most emotionally concentrated a unique figure in modern English verse. One addition made to the tally of compactly memorable poems here is the following quatrain, retrieved by Errington from an unpublished manuscript written in 1966, six months before Masefield's death:

   The lines I scribble here are weak,
    But not unblest has been my doom.
    I heard the poet Swinburne speak,
    In the Museum Reading Room.

The year before, he had published an epitaph in the Times for TS Eliot. Masefield both preceded and outlived the revolutionary early modernists, and, although he wasn't numbered among them, some of his best poetry responds to the same new world. In 1920, Eliot, writing about Swinburne, had declared himself in favour of "the new" over "morbid" Victorian floridity. With Swinburne, Eliot claimed, words had become detached from objects in "a hallucination of meaning": "[Swinburne's] language is not, like the language of bad poetry, dead... But the language which is more important to us is that which is struggling to digest and express new objects, new groups of objects, new feelings..."

Masefield could certainly speak the dead language of bad poetry; his early sonnet sequences are sprinkled with it, as they ruminate on "the self which withers like a flower" to "dusty Death". Yet the same poems also find more contemporary terms for their Shakespearean speculations - as when, for example, the poet imagines sailing across space to watch a distant sun being born ("a point of gloss"), grow and die, in accordance with the recently popularised theory of thermal entropy.

Of Masefield's best-known poems, "Sea-Fever" may now be better known through Spike Milligan's fatal travesty of its bardic opening line ("I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky; / I left my shoes and socks there - I wonder if they're dry?"). But "Cargoes" remains a great modernist lyric precisely because of its negotiation between high archaic diction and low new objects. It begins in vigorous Swinburnism: the exotic first line, "Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir", is not quite Eliot's "hallucination of meaning", but the mental picture it conjures for most readers will be hazy at best (quinquereme: an ancient galley-ship with five files of oarsmen on each side) and effectively secondary to the glamour of the sound. By the last stanza, however, the language has drawn closer to its object, as the same headlong rhythm draws ancient and modern into a poetic continuum:

   Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
    Butting through the channel in the mad March days,
    With a cargo of Tyne coal,
    Road-rails, pig-lead,
    Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

Masefield's "cheap" is not snobbish but pleased, evoking an egalitarian sufficiency of such goods across England (the list runs neatly northeast to southwest, from Tyne coal to Cornish tin). The poem digests and expresses new objects, and with them something like a new feeling: that industrialised society may be grimy and merciless - as the Victorian poets often felt - but that at the same time its endless activities and productions are inherently exciting to the imagination. The verbal image that "Cargoes" makes to express this feeling endures beyond its period: it was voted the nation's 24th favourite poem in 1998, and in the same year was paid the tribute of a distant but distinct echo in a sonnet by Paul Muldoon ("The Train": "with its car after car of coal and gas / and salt and wheat and rails and railway ties").

Masefield would have been disappointed that his poetic legacy has been lyric and not narrative: "story-telling", he wrote, was the "law of my being". But story-telling wasn't the historical condition of English poetry when he came to it. Old-fashioned yarns were better spun by newer media. Since the advent of the novel, and then film, the function of poetry has been to express the essentially lyrical feeling that everyday detail - cheap tin trays - is somehow significant in excess of narrative necessity.

The less-deceived young Philip Larkin mocked the vagrant narratives romanticised by Masefield's early poetry when he wrote in "Poetry of Departures" that he would "go today" to "Crouch in the fo'c'sle / Stubbly with goodness, if / It weren't so artificial". But the older Larkin represented Masefield generously in his Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, with, among other pieces, an extract from the narrative poem, Reynard the Fox (1919). Tellingly, what appeals to Larkin is not the narrative action of Masefield's foxhunt, but the rhyme-led panorama of preparation for it: grooms shaving "at glasses propped / On jutting bricks; they scraped and stropped", and ostlers "rubbing fox-flecks out of stirrups, / Dumbing buckles of their chirrups / By the touch of oily feathers". Such novelistic incantation of the provincial bears comparison with Larkin's own, and lends credence to his later claim that Masefield was a writer whose "strength and simplicity I have long admired".

The absence of the passage from this new Selected is a pity, as is the omission of most of the long lyric "Biography", with its vivid account of vagrant jobbing in America. The compensation of Errington's choice is variety. Sea-Fever shows that, although it was a constant theme - from Spanish-harbour lyrics in the Manchester Guardian in 1904 to "Lines for the Race of Sailing Ships, Lisbon to Hudson Bridge, near Manhattan, 1964" - there was more to Masefield than going down to the sea again: slangy comic ballads, Arthurian episodes, Hardyesque pastorals, delicate sketches of ballet dancers, poems from both wars, memories of WB Yeats, and even some lines on the assassination of John F Kennedy. All are executed with a quiet finesse and a concern for clarity in verse, which is also a concern for the widest range of readers; in Masefield's lifetime, 200,000 bought the Collected Poems

The price of Masefield's popularity with Betjeman's father's generation is that he will never be so popular again. Betjeman, in fact, is the enduring lyric poet of an England of "telegraph poles and tin" that Masefield might almost have been, had he more often - as at the end of "Cargoes" - rendered the contemporary with imagistic brevity. Sea-Fever restores him at least to the history of modern English poetry as both witness and participant.