But Bill, that is not a definition of the Georgians, it is an attack on their philosophy, their very being, as it were, and in order to make it you must exclude people like Robert Graves, Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen, whom Reeves includes in his early sixties anthology. But I would question whether you can do this. Is there really a difference between Brooke's 'The Soldier' and Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', beyond that Owen waas in the trenches and Brooke wasn't (he was dead). But I mean a difference in method. Owen said 'the poetry is in the pity' but that's nonsense, you know. The poetry is in the words. The old soldier who has just died at the age of a hundred and quite a lot felt pity as exquisite as Owns but had no poetry to show for it. He hadn't the gift, you see. The problem with Pound (and a few other modernists too) was that his theory far outstripped his talent. His greatest artistic triumph was 'The Wasteland', and it was the triumph of an editor, a sort of Charles Monteith to T.S. Eliot. I compared the Georgian anthology to the Imagist one that came out about the same time. The problem with the Imagists is they had a programme all right but little talent to carry it oout. The greatest artistic triumph in that book is the cover painting by Wyndham Lewis.
All this in my opinion of course.
|