In 1990, F.T. P rince dusted down James Fairborn's Book of Crests of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland (1859) for a late poem poking gentle fun at heraldic family mottoes. The supposed humility of a Latin tag advertising paternis suppar (‘Barely as good / As our begetters / And betters’) was somewhat disingenuous, he suspected:

What passes for reverence and supplication is, after all, self-aggran-disement. To claim kinship and genealogy is always an act of one-upmanship. Prince's self-effacing public persona as a poet remained sceptical of such endeavours; rare interviews gave away little about the canon that enthralled him or the avant-garde that embraced him. In conversation with Stephen Devereux in the 1980s, he suggested that his post-war writing was sustained by past admirers bullying him into print. Homage can also be a form of obliteration or a continuing power game, as his earlier ‘Epistle to a Patron’ makes clear. Prince's most obvious patron, T.S. Eliot, was an inconstant one. Eliot included two of Prince's poems in The Criterion before publishing Poems (1938) with Faber, but found his later poems to be ‘straining after something too grandiose’. Prince allowed himself a quiet dig at his former mentor in ‘The Inn’ from Soldiers Bathing (1954), where the first line of The Waste Land is flattened into the blithely matter-of-fact ‘February is the shortest month’ (CP, 58). W.H. Auden was among those who provided early encouragement when Prince came from South Africa to study English at Balliol College, Oxford, although Auden worried that Prince took himself ‘too seriously’. In fact, his seriousness would prove a useful recommendation for his unlikely election to Second World War poet. With Auden by this time in the US, Captain Frank Prince's poem ‘Soldiers Bathing’ (1942) found its way into many anthologies of the period. Prince's posthumous champions—Geoffrey Hill in particular—have sometimes echoed Eliot's ambivalence, though several essays here scotch Hill's diagnosis of Prince's late work being ‘hag-ridden by sincerity’.

These qualified pronouncements come in response to poetry that is honest about the perils of patronage or prestige, which might as easily result in ‘the stubs of an interminable descent’ as success.