John Osborne

John Osborne Poems

John Osborne Biography

John James Osborne (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and critic of the Establishment. The success of his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. In a productive life of more than 40 years, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and TV. His personal life was extravagant and iconoclastic. He was notorious for the ornate violence of his language, not only on behalf of the political causes he supported but also against his own family, including his wives and children. Osborne was one of the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. He was the first to question the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. During his peak (1956–1966), he helped make contempt an acceptable and now even cliched onstage emotion, argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behaviour and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit. Osborne was born in December 1929 in London, the son of Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a commercial artist and advertising copywriter of South Welsh extraction, and Nellie Beatrice, a Cockney barmaid. In 1935 the working-class family moved to the Surrey suburb of Stoneleigh, in search of a better life, though Osborne would regard it as a cultural desert - a schoolfriend declared subsequently that "he thought [we] were a lot of dull, uninteresting people, and probably a lot of us were. He was right." He adored his father and hated his mother, who he later wrote taught him "The fatality of hatred … She is my disease, an invitation to my sick room," and described her as "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent." Thomas died in 1941, leaving the young boy an insurance settlement which he used to finance a private education at Belmont College, a minor public school in Devon. He entered the school in 1943, but was expelled in the summer term of 1945, after whacking the headmaster, who had struck him for listening to a forbidden broadcast by Frank Sinatra. School Certificate was the only formal qualification he acquired, but he possessed a native intelligence.)

The Best Poem Of John Osborne

Flowere In God's Garden

We all are flowres in God's Garden
Each bearing a differing bloom,
We are only here for a season
And autumn oft cometh too soon.

Each of us has the potential
To be the loveliest of flowers,
To add charm and grace to the Garden
The choice quite simply is ours.

We may bring some joy to a life that is sad
Just through a word that is spoken
We may bring some peace to a troubled mind
Or hope to a heart that is broken.

For every flower has something to give
Or it maybe just something to share,
it may not be much, but may mean a great deal
To someone, sometime, somewhere.

Yes, we all have gifts to use as we will
And we never should miss any chance,
To freely give of the gifts we possess
And with love, God's Garden enhance.

For much may stem from the life that we live
Which now we're not able to see,
But the good seeds we sow, are the flowers that will grow
And bloom in Eternity.

John Osborne Comments

John Osborne Quotes