For several months he lived as a vagrant, drifting between odd jobs, before he returned to New York City and found work as a barkeeper's assistant.

Some time around Christmas 1895, he read the December edition of Truth, a New York periodical, which contained the poem "The Piper of Arll" by Duncan Campbell Scott.

[4]From 1895 to 1897, Masefield was employed at the huge Alexander Smith carpet factory in Yonkers, New York, where long hours were expected and conditions were far from ideal.

His interests at this time were diverse, and his reading included works by George du Maurier, Alexandre Dumas (père), Thomas Browne, William Hazlitt, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

In 1901, when Masefield was 23, he met his future wife, Constance de la Cherois Crommelin (6 February 1867 – 18 February 1960, from Cushendun in County Antrim, Northern Ireland; she was a sister to Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin), aged 35, and of Huguenot descent.

Educated in classics and English Literature, and a mathematics teacher, Constance was a good match for him, despite the difference in their ages.

[8] When the First World War began in 1914 Masefield was old enough to be exempted from military service, but he joined the staff of a British hospital for French soldiers, the Hôpital Temporaire d'Arc-en-Barrois in Haute-Marne, serving a six-week term during the spring of 1915.

Although his primary purpose was to lecture on English literature, he also intended to collect information on the mood and views of Americans regarding the war in Europe.

When he returned to England, he submitted a report to the British Foreign Office and suggested that he should be allowed to write a book about the failure of the Allied effort in the Dardanelles that might be used in the United States to counter German propaganda there.

Masefield then met the head of British Military Intelligence in France and was asked to write an account of the Battle of the Somme.

Although Masefield had grand ideas for his book, he was denied access to official records and what was intended to be the preface was published as The Old Front Line, a description of the geography of the Somme area.

A narrative poem, Reynard The Fox (1920), has been critically compared with works by Geoffrey Chaucer, not necessarily to Masefield's credit.

Between 1924 and 1939 he published 12 novels, which vary from stories of the sea (The Bird of Dawning, Victorious Troy) to social novels about modern England (The Hawbucks, The Square Peg), and from tales of an imaginary land in Central America (Sard Harker, Odtaa) to fantasies for children (The Midnight Folk, The Box of Delights).

Most of these were based on Christian themes, and Masefield, to his amazement, encountered a ban on the performance of plays on biblical subjects that went back to the Reformation and had been revived a generation earlier to prevent production of Oscar Wilde's Salome.

[11] In 1921 Masefield gave the British Academy's Shakespeare Lecture[12] and received an honorary doctorate of literature from the University of Oxford.

In 1923 he organised Oxford Recitations, an annual contest whose purpose was "to discover good speakers of verse and to encourage 'the beautiful speaking of poetry'".

On the recommendation of the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, King George V appointed Masefield, who remained in the post until his death in 1967.

Masefield's modesty was shown by his inclusion of a stamped and self-addressed envelope with each submission so that the poem could be returned if it was found unacceptable.

"Sonnet" Is there a great green commonwealth of Thought Which ranks the yearly pageant, and decides How Summer's royal progress shall be wrought, By secret stir which in each plant abides?

Additionally, his speaking engagements called him further away, often on much longer tours, yet he still produced significant amounts of work in a wide variety of genres.

In addition to the commission for Queen Alexandra's Memorial Ode with music by Elgar, many of Masefield's short poems were set as art songs by British composers of the time.