David Jones: The Heroic Vision

Extract

ItIs one of the ironies of English literary history that World War I, the first great modern war, coincided with what C. Day Lewis calls ‘a period of very low vitality’ for poetry. There were no Edwardian or Georgian figures to match the stature of Tennyson or Browning; the main tendencies of the age were visible not in the genius of one or two master spokesmen but in the talents of a host of minor poets. These poets, reacting to the disintegration of nineteenth-century values and conventions, turned from the contemporary reality to the peace and certainty afforded by the mellow beauties of the English countryside. In the words of their most gifted representative, Rupert Brooke, the Georgians sought ‘to forget/The lies, the truths, and pain …’; poetry became a shelter, an escape, an anodyne, a nostalgic daydream. The first Georgian Poetry anthology (1912), as Vivian de Sola Pinto remarks, ‘is a strange collection to represent English poetry at the moment when Europe was preparing for the First World War and England's stability was being rocked by the constitutional crisis and the impending disruption of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.’ The characteristic qualities of Georgian poetry — its blandness, its decorum, its homogeneity, its simplicity of attitude — all reflect the decline of a once powerful imaginative vision. Lyric poetry had become a mere exercise of sensibility related neither to the modern reality nor to any intellectual or imaginative vision capable of assimilating it.