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I Was a Poet, I Was Young”: a Reconsideration of the Georgian Group

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I Was a Poet, I Was Young”: a Reconsideration of the Georgian Group ”I was a poet, I was young”: a reconsideration of the Georgian group Cora MacGregor Published: 23 May 2020 Keywords: Georgian, poetry, traditional, literary past, divine, modernity Broad Street Humanities Review, 2 www.broadstreethumanitiesreview.com Broad Street Humanities Review, 2 2 of 10 1. Introduction In a 1932 article written for The Bookman, Wilfred Gibson, a former member of the self- titled Georgian group, acknowledged somewhat mournfully the infelicitous fate of their chosen nomen: if a young critic wishes to say something really nasty about another writer, he accuses them of being a Georgian poet; and in so doing not only offers him the last insult, but commits him irretrievably to the limbo of forgotten things.1 The dual effect of the insult, identified by Gibson here, offers a synecdochal vision of the movement’s legacy following the publication of the final Georgian Poetry, a biennial anthology which ran between 1911 and 1922: treated with contempt by their immediate successors, the repute of the group dwindled to the point of obsolescence. Recent critical accounts of early twentieth century literature tend to handle the ‘problem’ of the Georgians by making sweeping statements about their poetic commitments, which endeavour to impose a homogeneity upon this miscellaneous coalescence of young poets, brought together under the mentorship of Edward Marsh. One such assessment is made by C. K. Stead, whose characterisation of the Georgians typifies the modern attitude, being for the most part comparative: he contrasts them against their late-Victorian predecessors and Edwardian contemporaries, basing his single independent observation concerning their poetic philosophy upon a principle found tentatively expressed in only a small handful of the group’s correspondence and verse: In the work of the Georgians ‘poetry’ and ‘life’ begin to merge again: art is not for them something fragile, magical, and remote from ordinary living, as it was for the aesthetes; nor is life equated with politics, public affairs, and large conservative generalisations as it was for the imperialists. Life for them was what they experienced.2 Despite the proto-modernist flavour of the experiential poetics the Georgians have been credited with, most critics have found their efforts pale in comparison innovations of the ‘true’ modernists who proceeded them; no doubt the caricatured image of the Georgians as an elite group whose pontifications upon the delights of the Gloucestershire countryside formed the basis of their versified expression of life does not help them here. To say the Georgian theory of poetry revolved around an interest in life, observed and experienced, is not a total misattribution, but it is a limiting statement. The same is true of the retrospective tendency to treat the poetry produced by the group merely as the immature, pre-war experiments of those who would go on to be known for their martial verse: Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves. Indeed, it appears the Georgians’ resistance to a comprehensive theoretical account is the reason why their verse is continually 1 T. Rogers [ed.]. Georgian Poetry 1911-1922: The Critical Heritage. London, 1977: 333 2 Stead, C. K. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. [3rd ed.]. London, 1998: 82 Broad Street Humanities Review, 2 3 of 10 overlooked or subjected to dismissive generalisations. The one congruous feature of these various poets’ individual ambitions seems to have been a desire for change and innovation, an aspiration expressed by the nomen, ‘Georgian’, which proudly claims distinction from their Victorian and Edwardian predecessors. Yet this title also reflects a paradox of the Georgians’ work which has inhibited an understanding of them as straightforwardly neoteric or modern: the period predominantly denoted by the eponym is the 18th century, and the name thus inscribes the Georgians with ideas of retrospection, which pervade their work in other ways – in the proliferation of traditional forms found in the anthologies and in their propensity to classicise and intellectualise. I would contend however that the Georgians’ interest and value resides in their ostensible proclivity for the retrospective and retroactive. My intention here is to mount a reappraisal of the Georgian group by focussing on the work of two of their members. Rupert Brooke, is still known for his war sonnets, in particular ‘The Soldier’, although, I would argue, these poems are likely to be misunderstood, unless viewed in the context of his earlier work. Brooke was not the conservative patriot his isolated appearances in war anthologies would imply, but a man involved in the most progressive and liberal movements of his time: an ardent atheist, associate of the proto-Bloomsbury set, and member of the neo-pagans, a group which planned to throw convention to the wind and a live forever in the bloom of youth 3 . James Elroy Flecker, is now almost completely anonymous. Like Brooke, he died young in 1915, perhaps before the best of his work had been realised. His significance in this discussion, however, resides in his devotion to Parnassianism, a French literary doctrine of the previous century, which exemplifies both the diversity of the Georgians’ theoretical commitments, and the interest and value of their paradoxical progression-through-regression approach, which seems to have condemned the group to relative oblivion. 3 Brooke himself declared in a letter to Jacques Raverat that the neopagan intention was to “show the grey unvelieving age, [to] teach the whole damn World, that there’s a better Heaven than the pale serene Anglican windless harmonium-buzzing Eternity of the Christians, a Heaven in time, now and for ever, each for each, staying for all, a Heaven of Laughter and Bodies and Flowers and Love and People and Sun and Wind, in the only place we know or care for, ON EARTH.” See: G. Keynes [ed.]. The Letters of Rupert Brooke. London, 1968: 195 Broad Street Humanities Review, 2 4 of 10 2. Discussion Rupert Brooke: Patriot or pagan? Despite his acclaim (or, perhaps, notoriety) as a poet of the First World War, Brooke was absent from both battlefields and trenches, having died of sepsis on the way to Gallipoli. The verses Brooke composed in anticipation of war have thus come to be regarded as naïve and ignorant; they idealise the image of conflict presented by the establishment, which other war poets, such as Wilfred Owen, debased through their own versified expositions of wartime experiences. Contrasted against such figures, Brooke is, at best, pathetically innocent of the belligerent reality he would never face; at worst, complicit in the dissemination of propagandist notions of martial glory. Read superficially, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, the only non-war poem for which Brooke is known, compounds this impression. Here, the speaker (whom it is easy to identify as a version of Brooke himself) indulges the temptations of homesickness, and presents his Cambridgeshire residence, remembered from the Café des Westens in Berlin, as saccharine-sweet idyll, even aggrandising it, in a cascade of imaginative licence, as an Arcadian place of mythological inhabitation: And clever modern men have seen A faun a-peeping through the green, And felt the Classics were not dead, To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head, Or hear the Goat-foot piping low…4 Ostensibly, Brooke’s peopling of Grantchester with classical-pastoral beings is fairly trite, the reperformance of outdated poetic convention, which enters his verse in a manner reminiscent of the 17th-century country house poem (Brooke was, after all, a sometime scholar of Renaissance literature). Yet the assertion that the classics are felt to be alive indicates a degree of self-consciousness on Brooke’s part regarding his enactment of literary custom. The enumeration of mythological figures is proceeded by an evocation of various English literary greats (Byron, Chaucer, and Tennyson), who also come somehow to be present in at the vicarage. The chronological disorder of these representatives from the English canon, and the continued presence of classical elements (Byron, for example, swims as he has “learnt on Hellespont, or Styx”) effects a contraction of time. The speaker’s utilisation of the poetic mode to dispense with his geographical separation from Grantchester is echoed in the temporal transcendence practised by the English tradition; poetic nostalgia for the Hellenic golden age is coupled with Brooke’s personal nostalgia for his home. 4 Brooke, R. Collected Poems. Cambridge, 2010: 87 Broad Street Humanities Review, 2 5 of 10 Yet the self-reflective quality of Brooke’s verse effects something more than a metapoetic meditation upon the poet’s literary inheritance. The poem’s original title, ‘The Sentimental Exile’5, assumes an impersonal, descriptive stance, which distances or rather doubles the perspective vocalised by the poem: it is simultaneously that of the sentimental exile himself and that which is able to recognise him as such. Brooke asserts his awareness of the imaginative and emotional nature of the activity underpinning the poem’s composition; the remark that feeling is what animates the classics, in the lines quoted above, insists upon a similar acknowledgement. The poem is self-consciously subjective, aware that its exaggerated classicising elevations are the product of a mind structured around literary convention and anglicised Hellenic models. There is an element of iconoclasm at play also: Brooke participates in the tradition
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