[Jerome Betts]

Well, well, you live and learn. I knew the phrase 'nutty as a fruitcake', meaning crazed, but had no idea 'Old fruit' referred to it, or the other meaning put forward by W.F.Lantry. What I do remember is the use of 'fruit' to mean 'girl' (cf. 'crumpet' and 'totty') in some male circles (not mine) in 60s Oxford. Hence the at the time side-splitting headline, in reference to the Oxford Union (university debating society) not admitting female undergraduates, 'Union Fruitless Without Women', in Parson's Pleasure, an ancestor of the still flourishing satirical fortnightly Private Eye.

[T.S. Kerrigan]

As Oscar Wilde said, we are divided by a common language. It suspected no harm was meant, I only wished to clarify.

[John Whitworth]

God Heavens Jerome, I was at Oxford more or less at that time. (Merton 1964-67) but I don't remember girls as fruits. Totty I remember and in Edinburgh wee hairies (referring to the hair piled up on their heads I hasten to add). I also remember Douglas Hogg, he of the moat. An upper-class arsehole I thought and still do. I went out with, and briefly wanted to marry, Libby Purves, the first woman to win office at the Union. She was Librarian but failed to gain the presidency.

Gogle is vague about the provenance of old fruit and simply says it is Cockney Rhyming Slang (fruitgum = chum) I am deeply dubious about that. The Wodehouse use surely predates those things.

Fruity conversation certainly can mean conversation of a sexual nature, can't it? But girls as fruits? Did I come too late?

[Gregory Dowling]

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.)

[Holly Martins]

Thanks Clive, for your interesting info on Drinkwater. Gregory, Wikipedia has this to say about the poet:

John Drinkwater (1 June 1882 - 25 March 1937) was an English poet and dramatist.

He was born in Leytonstone, London, and worked as an insurance clerk. In the period immediately before the First World War, he was one of the group of poets associated with the Gloucestershire village of Dymock, along with Rupert Brooke and others.

In 1918, he scored his first major success with his play, Abraham Lincoln. He followed it up with other plays in a similar vein, including Mary Stuart and Oliver Cromwell. Although he had been active with the Dymock poets, it was not until 1923 that he published his first collection of poetry. He progressed into literary criticism, and later became manager of Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

He was married to Daisy Kennedy, the ex-wife of Benno Moiseiwitsch.

Papers relating to John Drinkwater and collected by his step daughter are held at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.

His name was given to a towerblock on a 1960's council estate in Leytonstone.

It's great that tower blocks on council estates are named after poets - it's another incentive to keep our noses to the grindstones. One other thing worth noting about the Georgians is the brevity of their poems, which can't be a bad thing. I wonder if they got this from Housman?

[Gregory Dowling]

Ah, the Dymock poets. Which included Edward Thomas and Robert Frost. I believe that local scholars even claim to have identified the two roads that divided in a yellow wood somewhere near the village. Anybody ever been to Dymock?

Having mentioned these two roads, it strikes me that the road itself is another theme that was common to many of these poets - in particular, the open road. It's a theme that probably comes down from writers like George Borrow and Richard Jefferies - writers that Edward Thomas, for example, admired greatly. I know Whitman wrote "Song of the Open Road", but he was really celebrating the fact that it was a public road, one that linked everyone in democratic fashion, whereas the English poets are always walking along country roads, and nearly always alone. Here's W. H. Davies, the "supertramp", in "Return to Nature":

Seek me no more where men are thick,
But in green lanes where I can walk
A mile, and still no human folk
Tread on my shadow.

Frost wrote "The Road Not Taken" about Thomas and sent it to him in a letter and the later poem he wrote in commemoration of him, "Iris by Night", celebrates a walk they took together. As it's not very well-known, and as it's fairly Georgian in spirit, I'll post it here:

One misty evening, one another’s guide,
We two were groping down a Malvern side
The last wet fields and dripping hedges home.
There came a moment of confusing lights,
Such as according to belief in Rome
Were seen of old at Memphis on the heights
Before the fragments of a former sun
Could concentrate anew and rise as one.
Light was a paste of pigment in our eyes.
And then there was a moon and then a scene
So watery as to seem submarine;
In which we two stood saturated, drowned.
The clover-mingled rowan on the ground
Had taken all the water it could as dew,
And still the air was saturated too,
Its airy pressure turned to water weight.
Then a small rainbow like a trellis gate,
A very small moon-made prismatic bow,
Stood closely over us through which to go.
And then we were vouchsafed the miracle
That never yet to other two befell
And I alone of us have lived to tell.
A wonder! Bow and rainbow as it bent,
Instead of moving with us as we went,
(To keep the pots of gold from being found)
It lifted from its dewy pediment
Its two mote-swimming many-colored ends,
And gathered them together in a ring.
And we two stood in it softly circled round
From all division time or foe can bring
In a relation of elected friends.

[T.S. Kerrigan]

John,

As a great modern poet once opined, the incredible, unprecedented, and never matched richness of Yeats can be appreciated without knowledge of his hermetic activities in the Order of the Golden Dawn, Theosophy, etc. The "rough beast" he prophesied in The Second Coming was, of course, the Antichrist, or, to you, Ms. Thatcher.

[John Whitworth]

When I worked in London the house next door belonged to the Theosophists. No-one was ever seen going either out or in. On the other side (though this is quite irrelevant) there was a hotel full of Irish girls seeking abortions.

[Jerome Betts]

John, the 'fruit' usage was a bit earlier in the 60s than your years and may have rapidly died. I suspect it may have been an import from some public school, perhaps Shrewsbury, which Richard Ingrams attended. He and Paul Foot edited Parson's Pleasure. Anyway, the fruit slang was sufficiently well known to make the joke headline work.

[Holly Martins]

W.H.Davies has been mentioned here but I can never think of him as a true Georgian, not middle-class enough and his style not literary enough, too rough and unsophisticated. Marrying a 20 year-old prostitute when he was 50 must have escaped the notice of the civil servant who allowed his name to be submitted to the PM as a possible Poet Laureate.

SHEEP

When I was once in Baltimore
A man came up to me and cried,
"Come, I have eighteen hundred sheep,
And we will sail on Tuesday's tide.

If you will sail with me, young man,
I'll pay you fifty shillings down;
These eighteen hundred sheep I take
From Baltimore to Glasgow town."

He paid me fifty shillings down,
I sailed with eighteen hundred sheep;
We soon had cleared the harbour's mouth,
We soon were in the salt sea deep.

The first night we were out at sea
Those sheep were quiet in their mind;
The second night they cried with fear -
They smelt no pastures in the wind.

They sniffed poor things for their green fields,
They cried so loud I could not sleep:
For fifty thousand shillings down
I would not sail again with sheep.