[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Richard Epstein

The sonorous cadences are nice; they had good ears, which can't always be said of their successors

Richard,

I think we have many points of agreement on this issue. But I do find it just a tad ironic that, in a place where it's habitual to speak well of North of Boston, the Georgians aren't more widely celebrated...

Thanks,

Bill

[John Whitworth]

Would Sphereans say that Belloc and Chesterton were Georgians?

[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.

[W.F. Lantry]

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

[John Whitworth]

Bill, all you say is true, but don't knock de la Mare, an upsy-downsy poet I agree. But actually very original.

The Song of the Mad Prince

Who said "Peacock Pie"?
The old king to the sparrow:
Who said "Crops are ripe"?
Rust to the harrow.

Who said, "Ay, mum's the word"?
Sexton to willow.
Who said, "Green dusk for dream?"
Moss for a pillow.

Who said, "All Time’s delight
Hath she for narrow bed;
Life’s troubled bubble broken"?—
That’s what I said.

[Holly Martins]

I agree with you about the fairy poems, Bill - we can well do without them, but the Georgians surely came into their own with the nature stuff. My favourite, Andrew Young, wrote very little but nature poems - 'Hard Frost' is a gem which I think I might have posted here before so I won't offer it again. After the Georgians people like Ted Hughes wrote about thistles, dead foxes and the horrible side of nature and now it seems to me very hard to write a fresh and interesting nature poem. I'd be very happy if I could write about glades and orchards.

[T.S. Kerrigan]

John, you have put me in the position of defending Pound, an unfamiliar position. In none of the biographies I have read has he been characterized as an "Old Fruit," that now unfashionable phrase commonly meaning an aging queen. The man kept two wives happy at the same time as I recall.

[John Whitworth]

This is an English Wodehousian use. Old Fruit = old fruitcake. I am suggesting that Pound was a daft old man, pretty well undeniable I'd say. I agree old Fruit does also mean what you say it means.