Frank Templeton Prince was a British poet and academic, known generally for his best-known poem Soldiers Bathing, written during the Second World War in 1942, which has been frequently included in anthologies.
He was born in Kimberley, South Africa. His father Henry (Harry) Prince (formerly Prinz) was from the East End of London, of Dutch-Jewish descent, while his mother was Scottish. He was educated at the Christian Brothers College in Kimberley, then Balliol College, Oxford

Balliol College, Oxford

Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....

. He had a visiting position at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

. In World War II he was involved in intelligence work at Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park is an estate located in the town of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, England, which currently houses the National Museum of Computing...

.

He married in 1943, and took an academic position after the war at the University of Southampton

University of Southampton

The University of Southampton is a British public university located in the city of Southampton, England, a member of the Russell Group. The origins of the university can be dated back to the founding of the Hartley Institution in 1862 by Henry Robertson Hartley. In 1902, the Institution developed...

, where he settled. In the mid-1970s, he taught at the University of the West Indies

University of the West Indies

The University of the West Indies , is an autonomous regional institution supported by and serving 17 English-speaking countries and territories in the Caribbean: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Dominica,...

 in Jamaica

Jamaica

Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...

, as well as Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

 in the United States and Sana'a University

Sana'a University

Sana'a University was established in 1970 as the first and the primary university in the Yemen Arab Republic , now the Republic of Yemen . It is located in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, and is currently organized with 17 faculties...

, Yemen

Yemen

The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....

.

Prince's early work drew praise from T.S. Eliot, who was then editor at Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...

. Eliot published some of his poetry in The Criterion

The Criterion (magazine)

The Criterion was a British literary magazine published from October 1922 to January 1939. The Criterion was, for most of its run, a quarterly journal, although for a period in 1927-28 it was published monthly. It was created by the poet, dramatist, and literary critic T. S...

 before publishing Prince's first book Poems in 1938. In work such as the Afterword on Rupert Brooke his interest in the metrical ideas of Robert Bridges

Robert Bridges

Robert Seymour Bridges, OM, was a British poet, and poet laureate from 1913 to 1930.-Personal and professional life:...

 is evident.

F. T. Prince died in Southampton

Southampton

Southampton is the largest city in the county of Hampshire on the south coast of England, and is situated south-west of London and north-west of Portsmouth. Southampton is a major port and the closest city to the New Forest...

 in 2003.

Works

• Poems (1938) Faber and Faber
  Faber and Faber
  Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...
  
  
• The Italian Element In Milton's Verse (1951) criticism
• Soldiers Bathing (1954)
• The Doors of Stone: Poems, 1938-1962 (1963)
• Memoirs in Oxford (1970) verse autobiography
• Drypoints of the Hasidim (1975)
• Afterword on Rupert Brooke
  Afterword on Rupert Brooke
  Afterword on Rupert Brooke is a poem by F. T. Prince published in 1976. Prince's note on the poem states "The verse is syllabic, in a measure of twelve syllables devised by Robert Bridges." He is referring to Bridges' Neo-Miltonic Syllabics...
  
  (1976)
• Collected Poems,1935-1992 (1979)
• Yuan Chen Variations
• Walks in Rome (1987) verse autobiography
• Collected Poems 1935-1992 (1993, Carcanet Press)