Brave New World: A Sonnet by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

John Magee (16) showing his mother the document declaring him the winner of the Rugby Poetry Prize in 1939 in the UK.

“High Flight” was not John Gillespie Magee Jr.’s only literary work. He wrote more than a dozen poems in his brief life, but he was most proud of his sonnet, “Brave New World,” which won the Rugby Poetry Prize in 1939. Chapter Eight of my novel, A Day in Eternity, imagines how he composed the sonnet along the North Devon shoreline. The novel’s title comes from a line in Magee’s sonnet: “We were but a day in Eternity … still, we believed ….”  Source: The Complete Works of John Magee, The Pilot Poet, This England Books, 1989.

Download PDF John G. Magee Sonnet, Brave New World

Brave New World – Kathryn Gabriel Loving.pdf

Download PDF • 206KB

The novel's title, A Day in Eternity, was inspired by a line in John Gillespie Magee Jr's sonnet, "Brave New World."