Introduction

Summary

The ‘Georgian’ poets, the ‘Muse Colony’, the ‘Dymock Poets’… all these terms have been used to describe the pre-First World War writers who were associated for a time with a specific geographical area, slightly south of Ledbury on the Gloucestershire/ Herefordshire border. Detailed accounts of these writers and their Dymock milieu were published in 1992 (Keith Clark's The Muse Colony) and 1994 (Sean Street's The Dymock Poets), so this study does not set out to repeat the material already available, or to compete with the narrative and literary historical emphasis found in these well-researched and readable books. The intention of this introductory study is to uncover more about the poetry itself, and to bring forward the themes and undercurrents found in the poetry being written around the Georgian years. This will not only help to right the balance in favour of the poetry itself, since some of it is unjustly neglected; but it will also support traditional literary historical studies as they exist at the moment.

The term ‘Georgian poet’ has latterly come to represent a writer of debilitated ruralist verse, and some of the less happy products of our sample group (particularly Drinkwater) might conform to this description. At the time, ‘Georgian’ meant something else entirely, and was seen as a reaction against the ornate late-Victorian style in poetry, with the term itself being deliberately invented by the influential Edward Marsh1 as a kind of marketing strategy. The movement, once it was under way and the subject of promotion by anthologies and journals, succumbed to its unfortunate timing near the outbreak of World War I, and the relentless criticism of vigorous anti-Georgians such as Ezra Pound, Middleton Murry and Richard Aldington.

Furthermore, ‘Georgian’ poetry, when seen in its 1914 context, tends to be defined by what it is not. It is not Imagist, it is not wholly about war, and it is consequently harder to theorize about in comparison with the boundaries drawn by other ‘isms’ of the same period. As if to add to the difficulty of defining Georgianism, it is unlikely that many of the poets concerned ever thought of themselves as members of a Georgian stable. In fact, they may have felt obstructed by such a title, with its paradoxical associations of tradition and monarchy.