Georgianism Then and Now­ A Recuperative Study James Richard Bridges A thesis submitted to the University of Gloucestershire in accordance with the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities September 2001 Abstract The thesis attempts to revise our view of Georgian poetry, and thus to rescue it from the critical disregard and disdain it has suffered since the 1930s. Georgian poetry will be redefined as a strong traditional poetry contemporaneous with, and yet different from, literary Modernism. An historical overview of the critical literature from the 1920s onwards will reveal the original co-existence of those now known as 'Georgians' and 'Modernists', stress their mutual break with Edwardian conventions, and will sketch the process by which Georgianism and Modernism became oppositional. Georgianism will be re-evaluated as a brave and creditable attempt to continue the Romantic and humanistic impulse in poetry at a time when younger and ostensibly more radical writers were forsaking it for the values of Modernism. The thesis will further suggest that the Georgian poets had a rather more socially aware and progressive agenda than many of the fledgling Modernists. Georgian poetry is reread, therefore, in order to bring out, as major themes, its concern with the poor and with work, with the changing environment of the nation, with the position of women in Georgian society, and with its response to the First World War. This reappraisal will lead to the contention that Georgianism should not be viewed as a low point in British poetry, but instead as supplying the formal foundations and political sensibility which mark the achievement of Great War poetry. While the thesis is careful not to overbid its claims for reviewing the Georgians' own achievement (especially in respect of their relative lack of formal experimentation compared to the Modernists), it hopes nevertheless to persuade its readers that the poets of 'Liberal England' had a more humane and realistic vision of their world than they have hitherto been credited with. Contents Introduction - 1. Defining Georgianism 1 11. A Genuine Revival: Origins and Trajectory 9 iii. Georgians and Modernists as Contemporaries 16 The Dream that Failed: Problematic Romanticism 33 and the Art of the Georgians - 1. Experience 36 11. Imagination, Dream and Psyche 39 111. Nature and Epiphany 50 IV. The Magic of Words 56 v. Humanism and Memory 67 Georgian Poetry: Real and Imagined Englands - 79 i. Masefield, Davies, de la Mare, Flecker 81 ii. Gibson, Abercrombie, Bottomley, Drinkwater, Thomas 94 lll. Brooke, Monro. 120 'That Pleasant Inn Called Woman': Representations of 134 Women in Georgianism - 1. Masefield, Davies, Thomas 136 11. Bottomley, Brooke, Flecker, Gibson, Abercrombie, Drinkwater 144 'We Willed It Not': The War and the Georgian Poets - 169 1. Masefield, de la Mare, Davies, Monro, Thomas 171 11. The 'Heroic Lapse': Brooke and Flecker 186 lll. Drinkwater, Abercrombie, Gibson 190 IV. The War Poets and Georgianism 202 Conclusion 229 '" '" '" Appendix 1 Bibliography 84 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Peter Widdowson and John Hughes, for their invaluable guidance and advice. Steve Bailey of the Dymock Poets Archive and Study Centre at the University of Gloucestershire gave important help with reprographics and access to material, as did the staff at the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the Brotherton Library of Leeds. My membership of the Friends of the Dymock Poets has proved both fruitful and interesting. Jeff Cooper assisted with some useful ideas and leads with regard to his grandfather, Lascelles Abercrombie. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their unflinching support in the course of the thesis. Author's Declaration I declare that the work in this thesis was carried out in accordance with the regulations of the University of Gloucestershire and is original except where indicated by specific reference in the text. No part of the thesis has been submitted as part of any other academic award. The thesis has not been presented to any other education institution in the United Kingdom or overseas. Any views expressed in the thesis are those of the author and in no way represent those of the college. 1 Introduction i. Defining Georgianism The term 'Georgian' was used by Edward Marsh as the title of a poetry anthology that he himself edited and promoted between 1912 and 1922, and which Harold Monro published at the Poetry Bookshop. There were five Georgian Poetry collections, the poets within them once seeming daring and controversial, and even to represent the future of English poetry. Now, however, 'Georgian' is a derogatory term, usually used to denote uninspired and trivial rural poetry. From the 1930s onwards, there have been many studies that have dismissed Georgian poetry as weak, derivative, bland and escapist. In New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), F .R. Leavis bewailed 'the vacuity of the Georgians,.1 C. Day Lewis in A Hope for Poetry (1934) described them as 'a sadly pedestrian rabble'.2 In Modern Poetry (1938), Louis MacNeice claimed that 'the Georgians had no world-view',3 and that they were 'rightly determined to be less "literary" than their predecessors but, dropping literature, they had not the strength to take up life'. 4 The views of these critics were fashioned from a shared climate. Poets and critics of the 1930s were heavily influenced by T.S. Eliot, and also by Auden and his associates. Although these two influences differ politically, they are nevertheless both 'political' in outlook. In short, social engagement was considered vital for poets, and failure to address the issues of the day was damning. But did the Georgians truly lack this engagement with social issues, and awareness of a wider society? - this is the question my thesis will centrally address. 2 Past studies of the Georgians have attempted to re-assess them in more general terms, but for me, this most fundamental of questions remains unanswered. It is my contention that these poets did address modernity, but mainly in the verse forms of an older poetic tradition. This prompts an inevitable question: does modem experience need to be expressed in Modernist verse forms? The achievement of poets of the 1950s, such as Larkin and Betjeman, has made this question more difficult. Philip Hobsbaum in Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry (1979) claims that John Betjeman 'did what no Georgian ever really managed: married a modem sensibility to a Victorian verse technique'.s For much of this thesis, it will be argued that what Betjeman allegedly managed was frequently the very essence of the Georgian achievement. This reassessment of the Georgians leads back to the question of re­ contextual ising them. In 1973, Donald Davie famously argued that the dominant influence in British poetry was not Yeats, Eliot or Pound, but Thomas Hardy. Davie's Thomas Hardy and British Poetry does not examine the Georgians, but the place of these poets in the indigenously English, non-Modernist line of poetry will receive some consideration here. Hardy is occasionally considered in connection with the Georgian poets (he himself had reservations about the label these younger writers adopted), but there are several points of comparison in matters of verse form, attitudes to nature, the English regions and the English people which require further exploration. While James Reeves, in his introduction to Georgian Poetry (1962), described Hardy as 'a father figure to the Georgians', 6 this is an avenue that has been neglected. In most of the present study's chapters, the relevance of Hardy will be touched upon. A number of critics have connected the fall of the Georgians to the First World War, and argued that their brand of liberalism went out of fashion with the decline of Liberal politics. This claim was made as early as 1935 in George Dangerfield's The Strange Death ofLiberal England. In some quarters, however, this has been the grounds 3 for measured re-assessment. C.K. Stead's The New Poetic (1964) distanced the 'group of liberal intellectuals which congregated around Eddie Marsh in 1911' from both 'Imperial poets' like Kipling and Newbolt, and the poets of the London Mercury like Squire and Freeman. 7 Robert H. Ross's The Georgian Revolt (1965) denied that the Georgians were 'misty-eyed lark-lovers', and also contrasted the original generation with the rear-guard 'Neo-Georgians' of the Mercury.8 Even Riding and Graves's A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), a book deeply hostile to the Georgians, admits this political dimension: 'Georgianism was an English dead movement contemporary with Imagism and politically affiliated with the then dominant Liberal party,.9 Similarly, Vivian de Sola Pinto's Crisis in English Poetry (1951), a book which is kinder to individual Georgians than to the movement itself, makes this connection: Georgian poetry, he says, 'represents that revival of English poetry which had accompanied the resurgence of Liberal England in the reign of Edward VII'.IO This point needs to be addressed more fully. Their humanitarianism - far more present in their verse than is commonly believed - has not had its due credit as a form of social criticism, and this study will seek to redress this. As John Butt was to reminisce of Lascelles Abercrombie, 'working with him was a humane and liberal education' .11 A 'Humane' and 'liberal' education is what the poetry of Abercrombie and other Georgians has to offer. The early twentieth-century 'Liberal Revival' is usually thought to include the novelists Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy and Forster, socialistic writers like Carpenter, Blatchford and Masterman, and the polemical Edwardian poets Chesterton and Belloc. The Georgian poets are the forgotten participants. It will be argued here that they should indeed be identified as liberals, but also as creditable poetic realists.