Quote:
Originally Posted by John Whitworth
But Bill, that is not a definition of the Georgians, it is an attack on their philosophy, their very being, as it were,
|
John,
Thanks for your note. I didn't *mean* for it to be an attack, that's why I chose the poems I did. These are some of my heroes: Hardy, Yeats, Housman. I actually love this stuff.
Yes, I purposely excluded Graves, precisely because his diction seems so modern to me, and his subjects and interests go well beyond beehives and stone walls.
Besides, an attack would be uninteresting. It would be shooting fish in a barrel to bring up Masefield and De La Mare. But since you argue for Thomas, let's look at one:
Bob's Lane
Women he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob,
Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath, but he
Loved horses. He himself was like a cob
And leather-coloured. Also he loved a tree.
For the life in them he loved most living things,
But a tree chiefly. All along the lane
He planted elms where now the stormcock sings
That travellers hear from the slow-climbing train.
Till then the track had never had a name
For all its thicket and the nightingales
That should have earned it. No one was to blame
To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails.
Many years since, Bob Hayward died, and now
None passes there because the mist and the rain
Out of the elms have turned the lane to slough
And gloom, the name alone survives, Bob's Lane.
What do we have? The tree, the thicket, the elms, the nightingales. The old farmer who loves nature. Horses and cobs. But the 90's said each man kills the thing he loves, and Bob does exactly that. And things are not going to work out. Already you can nearly hear the guns in the background. Even the bee-loud glade is already gone. He's already almost post-georgian.
I don't agree with those who argue that the Georgians are a bridge 'between the romantics and the moderns.' I much prefer to see them as a peaceful interlude between the decadence of the 90's and the chaos of the post great war years. Yeats excluded all war poets from his anthology, but I don't go that far, I just put them in a slightly different place.
Now, it's true that Americans tend to look at the Georgians with a slightly jaundiced eye. I'm not typical, in that I have a certain fondness for them. But this may be precisely because I live in a world without elm trees. Disease killed ours off decades ago. There's a forest and a stream and yes, even a glade behind my house. But there aren't any fairies flitting between the wild cherry trees: there are hornets, and they sting, hard. And copperheads. Lots of copperheads. Alas!
Thanks,
Bill