[Gregory Dowling]

I, too, have the James Reeves anthology but am away from home and can't remember exactly which poets are included nor how Reeves defines or describes the "group". Looking at the Wikipedia article on Georgian Poetry, I see that the term was "was the title of a series of anthologies showcasing the work of a school of English poetry that established itself during the early years of the reign of King George V of the United Kingdom." The list of names in these anthologies (five in all) is interesting, including, for example, D.H. Lawrence (present in four out of the five anthologies), Robert Graves, and many of the major First World War poets (Rosenberg, Blunden, Sassoon), with the significant exceptions of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas. Of course, nobody would dream of describing Lawrence today as a "Georgian poet" but it seems he was felt to belong at the time - and he himself didn't mind being included along with Drinkwater, Gibson and Abercrombie (I imagine the money helped).

Would anybody care to have a go at defining the Georgians? And would the definition include Thomas? And Frost?

[W.F. Lantry]

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

[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, 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.