GEORGIAN POETRY

GEORGIAN POETRY
 Name given by Sir Edward (Eddie) Marsh, for his
anthology Georgian Poetry, published 1912.
 Followed by four further collections in 1915, 1917,
1919 and 1922.
 Main poets Walter De La Mare, Rupert Brooke,
Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Charles
Blunden, Ralph Hodgson.
 Not a school of poetry in continental terms.
 Closer to generation, with English poets who
published in the first two decades of the C20th.
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 Characteristics:
 Generally conservative in theme and style.
 Poets were “generally content to adopt the
traditional conventions, forms and dictions of English
poetry”.
 Rejection of continental models.
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 Inspiration from nature and the countryside.

 Considered often to be “diluted and middlebrow”
using conventions of late Romanticism.
 “Georgian” in time “came to be a pejorative term,
used in a sense not intended by its progenitors:
rooted in its period and looking backward rather
than forward.”
 Name taken from monarch, George V, reigned from
1910-1936.
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 Contemporary tendency to “rely on theme and

technique as yardsticks for classifying a poet as
Georgian, rather than on mere inclusion in Marsh’s
anthology”.
 Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen “Georgians”, but
not in anthologies.
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 H. Coombes:
 “Georgian poetry derives from early and later
nineteenth century romantic poetry”.
 Takes on characteristics such as “vague emotion,
inexpressive sing-song rhythms, emphasis on Surface
verbal music for its own sake, and the tendency to
fantasy and dreams without a very strong human
interest”.
 Influenced by Milton, the Romantics and the
Victorians, not metaphysicals and Neo-Classicals.
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 Babette Deutsch:
 Notes Georgian insistence “on loss, the grief of aging,
and the stab of personal extinction”.
 Particularly true in Works of Walter De La Mare
whose “lyrics lament the encroachment of the
‘prison-house’ upon the child’s world of fantasy” and
the blunting of senses by materialism similar to that
of Wordsworth.
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 ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,  But only a host of phantom listeners
 Knocking on the moonlit door;  That dwelt in the lone house then
 And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
 Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
 Of the forest’s ferny floor:
 And a bird flew up out of the turret,  To that voice from the world of men:
 Above the Traveller’s head:
 Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark
 And he smote upon the door again a second time; stair,
 ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
 But no one descended to the Traveller;
 That goes down to the empty hall,
 No head from the leaf-fringed sill  Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
 Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
 By the lonely Traveller’s call.
 Where he stood perplexed and still.
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 Never the least stir made the listeners,

 And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
 Though every word he spake
 Their stillness answering his cry,
 Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still
 While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
house
 ’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
 From the one man left awake:
 For he suddenly smote on the door, even
 Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
 Louder, and lifted his head:—
 And the sound of iron on stone,
 ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
 And how the silence surged softly backward,
 That I kept my word,’ he said.
 When the plunging hoofs were gone.
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