Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregory Dowling
Would anybody care to have a go at defining the Georgians?
|
Gregory,
That's easy, the hard part is putting names to the group. Forget the timeframe. And forget whoever was king, when.
Dowson, bless his heart, is dead. And so, alas, is decadence. The 90's are over. We haven't had the great war yet, nobody's heard of Einstein, and the armory show is on no-one's radar. An intellectual world without picasso, or braque, or even cezanne being widely know. No riots yet over the rite of spring, no imagists, no Wittgenstein, heck, we're not even at Bertrand Russell, really. Freud is doing some stuff, but he hasn't caught on. Imagine that world?
Now imagine the poems. It's apple blossom time. Snow on webbed branches in the suburbs. Poems about walls and brooks. How sad that runner died in the bloom of youth! Oh, and if you look just right, you can see fairies dancing around in the orchards. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a bee-loud glade?
Of course it would! Sadly, the orchard got blown to bits by artillery, and that was the end of the georgians. Those fairies are just in our heads, and people are throwing bombs over walls and into carriages. Not in this country, of course, which is why they lasted quite a bit longer over here. Heck, some of them made it into the 60's here, still writing about orchards.
Many will object to the list of poets I've given. "He's no Georgian, nor that one either!" But I'm talking about a kind of poetry, rather than a list of poets. Perhaps it even suited its time. But I'm pretty sure that Thomas doesn't belong there. Nor Graves, nor Lawrence, nor any of the war poets. And just forget Chesterton. Doesn't fit at all.
Thanks,
Bill