Godfrey John

Godfrey John was born and grew up in Wales. He served in the Royal Air Force, and graduated from Cambridge University,[1] where he was boxing team captain and a "light blue", and was a British amateur heavyweight boxing champion. For more than 40 years, poems and essays by John were published in the Christian Science Monitor.[2]

Godfrey John moved to the United States in 1958, where he lived and worked and received a first award from the Academy of American Poets.[3] He was a professor of English at several colleges in the United States,[1] including Principia College,[4] and later worked as an arts critic for the Christian Science Monitor. He became a public practitioner of Christian Science.[5] In 1970, he moved to Canada, where he became a dual citizen (Canadian and British). In Canada, he also became a Christian Science teacher and served briefly on the Christian Science Board of Lectureship.[6] For many years he was also active as a voluntary probation and parole officer.[7] He had two children with his wife Rosalind,[5] and lived in Toronto.[8]

Godfrey John was widely published in the Christian Science periodicals, including the Monitor, for over 40 years.[9] He published a collection of poems and essays in the books Five Seasons (Foursquare Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977) and Compassion Wins (Thomson-Shore, Inc., Dexter, Michigan, 2001).[5] The foreword of his first book was written by Henrietta Buckmaster, and the second by Rushworth Kidder.[10][11] He is also published in a number of anthologies including Boundless Light: Poems of Healing.[12]

Some of his poems are in the Welsh cywydd form.

• Writings of Godfrey John on Christian Science JSH-Online
• Godfrey John poems on Moodesigns