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

Home , Parnassianism, Rupert Brooke, The Group (literature)

”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

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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

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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

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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 only to reveal its superficiality, that the use of classical imagery by such poems metamorphoses it into mere figurative adornment.

The irreverent approach towards the literary past, which emerges in ‘Grantchester’ through Brooke’s consciousness of his own poetic tendencies, presents itself with less subtlety, although perhaps more humour, in Brooke’s more overtly satirical poems, notably ‘Menelaus and Helen’, and ‘It’s Not Going to Happen Again’. The final stanza of the latter considers Shakespearean and classical couples, claiming that the male party of each, like the poem’s speaker, foreswore love and the trouble it causes:

It’s the very first word that poor Juliet heard From her Romeo over the Styx; And the Roman will tell Cleopatra in hell When she starts her immortal old tricks; What Paris was tellin’ for good-bye to Helen When he bundled her into the train– Oh, it’s not going to happen again, old girl, It’s not going to happen again.6

The introduction of renowned characters from Shakespeare and Homer to a music- hall style composition7 effects a strikingly incongruent pairing of form and content. The swift pace of Brooke’s enumeration means he declines to dwell upon the idiosyncratic features of his example couples: the only situational matter of any import is that each is able to represent two sides of a romantic dichotomy. The reduction of these canonical fictional figures to mere illustrative exemplum and the discordant tone of Brooke’s poem constitutes a deliberate flouting of convention, an insistence upon a blasé attitude, devoid of respect for the past.

5 See: Keynes, 1968: 403-404 6 Brooke, 2010: 154 7 Brooke’s use of internal rhymes and colloquialisms makes ‘It’s Not Going to Happen Again’ reminiscent of this mode.

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In a similar fashion, ‘Menelaus and Helen’ mocks the classical celebration of Helen of Troy’s beauty and Menelaus’ efforts to reclaim his former bride: having exultingly described the reunion of husband and wife, the second section of this bipartite poem describes the aged, conjugal state of the “perfect Knight” and “perfect Queen”: Helen, the emblem of eternal beauty, grows “gummy-eyed and impotent”, while Menelaus, the noble warrior and devoted husband, ponders “why on earth he went | Troyward”.8 As in ‘It’s Not Going to Happen Again’, Brooke bathetically completes what poets have conventionally idealised, rejecting their romanticisations in favour of an iconoclastic exposure of the human realities that earlier poetry ignored: disenchantment with love as the result of pain and age. Paul Delany reads Brooke’s tendency to adopt a cynical posture towards matters of the heart as reflective of his personal concerns, arguing of ‘Menelaus and Helen’ that “[w]hen he wrote the poem, Rupert was revealing his fear of actually sharing a life with any of the young women he loved.”9 While Brooke’s biography, which reveals an extensive history of love affairs and heartbreak, validates Delany’s interpretation, such a reading can more comprehensively account for Brooke’s lyric poems and sonnets. Poems such as the two in discussion resist the reductive force of a purely biographical reading, since their tone is not emotional, but satirical. In locating the object of Brooke’s satire, the reader is obliged to consider the modern poet’s relation to his literary precursors. “So far the poet” initiates the second part of ‘Menelaus and Helen’ and concludes the first, which relates the Fall of Troy. The anonymity of the poet to whom Brooke attributes the versified celebration of love and heroism, of which his own poem is, initially, a pastiche, accentuates the dismissiveness of his attitude. The action depicted by ‘Menelaus and Helen’, in which the vengeful Menelaus drops his sword at the sight of his beautiful wife, is one of many versions of the reunion10, but Brooke conflates the whole heterogenous tradition of the Trojan narrative into this one, archetypal scene. In refusing accuracy, specificity, and completeness of reference, Brooke denounces the significance of the original context and creator, instead subordinating inherited plots and characters to a personal and modern agenda.

Notably, the dissenting attitude Brooke’s verse assumes with regards to the established and traditional is not limited to attacks on the literary past. In an epistolary remark made to Edward Marsh, while he was a housemaster at Rugby School, Brooke expressed the hope that “a certain incisive incredulity in [his] voice when [he] mentions the word God is … slowly dripping the poison of truth into [his student’s] young souls.”11 His ardent atheism and dilletante interest in comparative anthropology emerge in his work through versified depictions of both pagan and Christian mythic narratives and

8 Brooke, 2010: 64-65 9 Delany, P. The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle. London, 1987: 77 10 This version of Helen and Menelaus’ reunion is absent from the Homeric poems, but seems to have gained traction in the 5th century BC, and is found in vase illustrations and some Euripidean plays. See: Edmunds, L. Stealing Helen: The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Comparative Perspective. Princeton, 2015: 147-148 11 Keynes, 1968: 225

Broad Street Humanities Review, 2 7 of 10 religious customs. One mythographic poem derived from the Roman tradition is Brooke’s sonnet, ‘The Goddess in the Wood’, which appears to describe Venus’ reaction to the realisation of Adonis’ death, although contextual references are limited to the nominal identification of the goddess and mentions of her “human lover”.12 The poem ends by contrasting the ephemerality of Adonis’ existence with the eternal nature of Venus, a juxtaposition which has the potential to undermine the impression of the goddess’ sorrow: what, after all, can it possibly mean for “immortal eyes to look on death”?

A comparable exploration of the dynamic subsisting between the human and the divine occurs in one of Brooke’s later poems, ‘Mary and Gabriel’, in which the archangel affirms for Mary that she is pregnant with the son of God. Gabriel is splendid, but aloof, repeatedly described by negated adjectives such as “incurious”, “unmoved, “unswerving”, “unreluctant”, and, of course, “immortal”. 13 Gabriel’s nexus of lexical associations nullifies his capacity for empathy or humanity – in both senses of the word. Contrastingly, the chaos of Mary’s emotions and the physical reality of her pregnancy, as something corporeal rather than supernatural, are impressed strongly upon the reader, and the final image is of her standing alone in a space that “was colder, and grey”; meanwhile the angel ascended to the “gold skies”. A conjunctive reading of this poem with ‘The Goddess in the Woods’ renders the hostility is expresses towards religion still more poignant. The comparable implications Brooke finds in Biblical and Roman narratives aligns the Christian tradition not only with a mythic corpus in which the gods are indifferent, and often cruel, but with a mythic corpus which is now defunct and secularised. ‘On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotamus Goddess’ is a poem which ridicules the devotion of an ostensibly primitive culture to a preposterous goddess, who allegedly ate her people’s children. Yet the final lament, “What shall we do | Now God is dying?”14 has a more contemporary resonance: it gestures to the increasing godlessness of Brooke’s own age while at the same time identifying the absurdity of the religions they have left behind. Brooke’s attraction to ancient faiths is something of a paradox: it is their outmodedness that he finds can speak to the present day and invert ideas of value prevalent in Christian culture.

It is in light of Brooke’s comedy, irreverence, and iconoclasm that ‘The Solider’, and Brooke’s other war poems, should be read. Brooke is being serious in ‘The Solider’, but his seriousness is also subversive. The complete omission of any reference to God is a significant absence, since the poem seems to express the sort of nationalistic ardour typically complicit with Christian institutions. The return to England which Brooke envisages here recalls the repatriation effected by Grantchester, the idea of a transcendental contraction of distance effected through the medium of verse. But this image is tempered by the terrestrial physicality which dominates the poem, the recurrent

12 Brooke, 2010: 81 13Ibid.: 96-98 14 Ibid.: 13-14

Broad Street Humanities Review, 2 8 of 10 presence of dust, earth, and foreign and English topography. Brooke positions his meditation on death within a poetic and areligious framework, which precludes an institutionalised understanding of death in war. The poem is idealistic, but what it idealises is the soldier’s personal memory of his home, a connection which runs deeper than patriotic ties to either church or state.

James Elroy Flecker: The Parnassian past

A contemporary and literary associate of Brooke (indeed it seems to have been Brooke who introduced him to the Georgian circle), Flecker’s verse and theoretical writings manifest a similar interest in their own modernity and in the transformative promise of new a tradition of English poetry. However, Flecker’s commitment to innovation in literature is mediated through his simultaneous devotion to Parnassianism, a mid- nineteenth-century literary movement, predominantly practised in France, characterised by a compositional formality and emotional disengagement from the poetic subject. In his 1913 ‘Preface’ to The Golden Journey to Samarkand, Flecker exhorts his fellow English poets to revive the continental doctrine, claiming that since “[it] is a Latin theory, [it is] the most likely to supply the defects of the Saxon genius”.15 The thrust of Flecker’s argument in this introduction emphasises one particular aspect of the Parnassian creed: its retrospection and propensity to invoke traditional forms and classical models in its attack on the sullied and sentimental poetry of the modern era. Flecker’s conscious association of himself with the theory is thus both reactionary and revolutionary: reactionary because the theory was both, in its origin, a push-back against the artistic innovations of the 1800s, and, by the time Flecker came to deploy its principles, outmoded; revolutionary because the theory was foreign to both the culture and epoch Flecker sought to introduce it to, and because his intention was that it might remedy the stagnation of the twentieth-century English poetry.

Although Flecker praises Parnassianism unequivocally in his prose writings, his poetic experimentations in the doctrine are more inclined to express trepidation. Central to the Parnassian ideal is distanciation: the Parnassian poet conceives of literature as existing in a bracketed space and celebrates the Kantian notion of aesthetic distance. The remoteness of a subject, therefore, determines its poetic suitability, since it offers protection to art’s hermeticity. Flecker’s relocation of this idea to the start of the twentieth century, during the ascendency of a new literature of experience, produces a tension in his work.16 This struggle between his chosen theory and the guiding principles of the new poetic was putatively exacerbated by his own impulse to personalisation. Milton Bronner suggests that Flecker’s enthusiasm for Parnassianism was subdued by the progression of

15 Flecker, J. E. The Golden Journey to Samarkand. London, 1913: vii 16 Flecker’s Parnassianism also substantiates the earlier claim made by this essay regarding the diversity of the poetic principles held by different Georgian poets, and the impossibility of defining this term according to theoretical commitments.

Broad Street Humanities Review, 2 9 of 10 the tuberculosis that was to kill him, arguing that this introduced to his work “the lyric cry, the personal touch and tone that takes him away from poetic art as the Parnassians taught it.”17 While the chronology of Flecker’s illness makes Bronner’s argument for a correspondent disavowal of Parnassianism unlikely (the decline in his health was sufficiently advanced by 1910 for him to be spending extended periods in sanitoriums18, yet, as aforementioned, his most overt espousal of Parnassianism was published in 1913), he nonetheless identifies an important oscillation in Flecker’s work.

Two out of the six Flecker poems which appeared in Georgian Poetry 1913-1915, ‘The Old Ships’ and ‘Santorin’, provide an intimation of the poet’s own circumstances. The subjects of these poems belong simultaneously to the ancient past and the present day, and seem to gesture implicitly to the sometime geographical proximity of the poet to the Parnassians’ favoured subjects (as an employee of the Levant Consular Service, Flecker spent extensive time in both Greece and the near East). ‘The Old Ships’, which mediates upon the history of vessels docked at the Lebanese city of Tyre, begins by identifying the presence of the speaker at the scene he describes: “I have seen”19; this phrase is reiterated in the first line of the second verse paragraph: “But I have seen”. Yet the way in which the poet is seeing changes: for while the first instance of this phrase refers to the literal sight of the town and its harbour, the second introduces an imaginative vision of another, still more ancient vessel. The age of the eponymous ships and the apparent timelessness of the town, “which men still call Tyre”, ostensibly synchronises the present moment, which the poet has witnessed, with the locale’s Phoenician history, thus the distance considered so desirable by the Parnassians. Yet the speaker is aware that his imagination is running away with him: his speculation over what this ship, or some ancestor of it, might have seen (slaves, pirates, and Greeks returning from Troy) is punctuated by qualifying acknowledgment, “who knows – who knows”. The almost ekphrastic spiral from the sight of the ships into nautical legend means the poem refuses to fix its subject in either the present or the past.

‘Santorin’ also appears to exploit the absence of geographical distance between subject and speaker to transcend the temporal divide as well. In this poem, the lady of Aegean appears to one abord a modern ship and asks for her lover, Alexander the Great, only to discover that he is long dead. Flecker here reverses the expected process of mystification: rather than the sailor being bewildered by the sudden appearance of a legendary being, the sea-lady is the one confused by their technological advancements, the “magic ship | That sails without a sail”.20 The return to the mythological past expected of a poem which subtitles itself “A Legend of the Aegean” cannot be effected; instead the ancient

17 Bronner, M. ‘James Elroy Flecker – English Parnassian’. The Bookman 43.6, 1916: 634 18 See: Bosworth, M. ‘James Elroy Flecker: Poet, Diplomat, Orientalist’. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 69.2, 1987: 365 19 K. Hale [ed.]. Georgian Poetry: A Compilation of Georgian Poetry 1911-1922. Marston Gate, 2014: 178-179 20 Ibid.: 180-181

Broad Street Humanities Review, 2 10 of 10 past comes to the meet the present day, but in a way which renders its potential narrative impotent: only the sea-lady, and not her mythic lover, can be revived. Flecker’s assumption of quasi-historical and mythological subjects in these poems forms the basis of an interrogation of Parnassian principles against the contemporary trend for experiential poetics. While what emerges from his experimentations in this regard is a sense of poetic stasis, they evidence his commitment to literary progression – even if this is to be found retroactively.

5. Conclusions In spite of their obvious differences as poets, we can use both Brooke and Flecker to support the case for a re-evaluation of the Georgian poets. The criticism oft levelled against the movement – that any innovative or progressive dimension their verse aspires to is curtailed by their apparent weakness for the outmoded forms and subjects of tradition – has here been undermined by a close reading reading of their work, which instead reveals, in Brooke’s case, a subversive interest in dispensing with the values of the past and, in Flecker’s, a keen desire to test out the models and principles of the past against the developing doctrines of modernity.

Bibliography

1. Bosworth, M. ‘James Elroy Flecker: Poet, Diplomat, Orientalist’. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 69.2, 1987: 365 2. Brooke, R. Collected Poems. Cambridge, 2010: 87 3. Bronner, M. ‘James Elroy Flecker – English Parnassian’. The Bookman 43.6, 1916: 634 Delany, P. The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle. London, 1987: 77 4. Edmunds, L. Stealing Helen: The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Comparative Perspective. Princeton, 2015: 147-148 5. Flecker, J. E. The Golden Journey to Samarkand. London, 1913: vii 6. Hale, K [ed.]. Georgian Poetry: A Compilation of Georgian Poetry 1911-1922. Marston Gate, 2014: 178- 179 7. Keynes, G [ed.]. The Letters of Rupert Brooke. London, 1968: 195 8. Stead, C. K. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. [3rd ed.]. London, 1998: 82 9. T. Rogers [ed.]. Georgian Poetry 1911-1922: The Critical Heritage. London, 1977: 333