Reading through this rather wandering conversation I'm struck by the fact that every time someone comes up with a generalisation about the Georgians (apple blossom, snow on webbed branches...), someone else comes up with an exception (don't knock de la Mare, E. Thomas, R. Graves...). If we take the original anthologies as our touchstone, it's clear that the term covers a very disparate group of poets. If we take Reeves's anthology, the same thing goes. Bill has certainly defined a certain mood of a certain strain of poetry at a certain (rather short) point of time, but of course many of these poets wrote before and after that time, and many of them developed in interesting or surprising ways (Yeats is not the only one). It strikes me that it would probably be more profitable to devote threads to individual poets - particularly those most commonly seen as minor. De La Mare is an obvious case but I would also stake a claim for Masefield as an interesting poet, who didn't only write "Cargoes" and "Sea Fever" (fine poems though they are).
I just toss the suggestion up. Anyone care to say more about John Drinkwater, given that his name stands at the head of this thread?
(By the way, I had no idea of the sexual connotations of the expression "old fruit", which I too knew mainly from Wodehouse.)
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