The Moorlands, Woldingham, Surrey
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
GEORGIAN POETRY, 1918–1919 Edited by E. M. The Poetry Bookshop 6s. net.
The new collection of Georgian Poetry contains specimens of the work of nineteen poets, fourteen of whom have appeared in one or more of the previous volumes of the series, while five are represented for the first time. The fourteen are Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, Mr. Gordon Bottomley, Mr. W. H. Davies, Mr. Walter de la Mare, Mr. John Drinkwater, Mr. John Freeman, Mr. W. W. Gibson, Mr. Robert Graves, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, Mr. Harold Monro, Mr. Robert Nichols, Mr. Siegfried Sassoon, Mr. J. C. Squire, and Mr. W. J. Turner. The five are Mr. Francis Brett Young, Mr. Thomas Moult, Mr. J. D. C. Pellow, Mr. Edward Shanks, and Mrs. Fredegond Shove. On account of their editorial connection with the London Mercury, the contributions of Mr. Squire and Mr. Shanks will not receive further mention in this notice.
"I hope," observes E. M. in his preface, "that [the present volume] may be thought to show that what for want of a better word is called Peace has not interfered with the writing of good poetry." Certainly many critics have supposed that war was the prime generator of what they admit to be a new movement in poetry. But the anthologist's hope is justified, on a priori grounds at least, by the fact that the movement began, however tentatively, before the late war. The first collection of Georgian Poetry appeared in 1912, when the title expressed an act of faith, based on an act of divination, which has since been confirmed. A comparison of the four members of the series suggests that what, for want of a better word, has received this name, is still in a state of slow development towards a certain community of spirit and attitude, which does not however connote any uniformity of style. In the third volume the nebula appeared to be taking shape, and in the fourth the process has advanced a stage. E. M. may be issuing the fourteenth before that shape can be accurately defined and described. The curve has not been drawn far enough for us to say what course it will trace; but there is already enough of it to look like a curve and not merely like a wavy line.
That remote first volume, which was of course a symptom and a rallying-point or the new tendencies, not their origin, seems now to have been somewhat chaotic and lacking in direction. It included such older poets as Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. Sturge Moore, and Sir Ronald Ross; and some of those who appear to-day the most characteristic had not then shown themselves. At that time the most powerful tendency seemed to be leading towards the realism, sometimes informed with a conscious brutality, of Mr. Masefield, Mr. Gibson, and Mr. Abercrombie. In 1919 this sort is fully represented only by Mr. Abercrombie's Witchcraft: New Style, a poem principally in dialogue which is realistic in method, if its conception has a fairy-tale brutality about it. Such lines as the following are in a familiar style:
A little brisk grey slattern of a woman,
Pattering along in her loose-heel'd clogs,
Push't the brass-barr'd door of a public-house;
The spring went hard against her; hand and knee
Shoved their weak best. As the door poised ajar
Hullabaloo of talking men burst out,
A pouring babble of inflamed palaver.