“Play up! Play up! And Play the Game!”

When Donald E. Stanford, coeditor of the Southern Review from 1965 to 1983, died in 1998, he left in manuscript a remarkable final critical book, the outgrowth of his lifelong study of English poetry written during the life of Robert Bridges (1844–1930). Earlier fruits of his interest in this British poet were Robert Bridges: Selected Poems (1974), In the Classic Mode: The Achievement of Robert Bridges (1978), and the two-volume Selected Letters of Robert Bridges (1983–1984). His study of four British writers, all friends of Bridges, has been edited with care by Rebecca W. Crump of Louisiana State University, who earlier edited Stanford’s Complete Poems (2002) and Order in Variety (1991), a festschrift honoring his retirement.

Stanford’s scholarship provided him with a wide-ranging knowledge of a literary world in transition from the Victorian era into the modern. Within this milieu, often using unpublished materials, he sketches the lives of Margaret Louisa Woods, Mary Coleridge, Sir Henry Newbolt, and Robert C. Trevelyan. He discusses in detail their poetry, fiction, history, and criticism, and evaluates their work—especially the works for which each of them was most recognized during his or her lifetime. All four were “once famous or highly esteemed,” and all were literary friends of Bridges who corresponded with him and were influenced by his poetry and criticism. All wrote on themes favored by Bridges—nature, beauty in various forms, love, and important questions of faith and philosophy. Like Bridges, Newbolt and Trevelyan experimented with quantitative and syllabic verse. All except Coleridge wrote verse dramas, as did Bridges, T. Sturge Moore, and W. B. Yeats in the same period.

Stanford rates the individual achievements of these writers as much lower than the work of the five major poets treated in his Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry: Studies in Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E. A. Robinson, and Yvor Winters (1983), an important study. He praises only a handful of poems by Margaret Woods—on Oxford landscapes and on the Boer War and World War I —but suggests that a reading of her novels and criticism are valuable for understanding the cultural history of this significant period. Of Mary Coleridge he observes that her “entertaining short stories,” her one “substantial” novel, and her “perceptive and witty” essays are worth study, while in lyric poetry (over two hundred short poems) her talent found its “most successful expression.” She “deserves to be anthologized, but she seldom is.” Of Sir Henry Newbolt, whose book of poems, Admirals All (1897), was a best seller, Stanford observes that he was “most famous” for his expression of British patriotism. He wrote successful historical novels; an engaging autobiography, My World As In My Time: 1862–1932; and an “absorbing” history of the British navy in World War I. Newbolt’s war ballads and songs, written in a period of British world power, give him some claim to interest today, and his “Vitaï Lampada,” about his public school, Clifton, “captured the hearts of the English,” and “Play up! play up! and play the game!” became part of the British ethos (now in decay). Robert Trevelyan wrote poetry from an early age, expressing his passion for Greek poetry by translating Greek plays and experimenting with classical prosody in English. During World War II he founded the Abinger Chronicle to lift British spirits with essays, poems, and anecdotes.

Stanford’s biographical accounts present an engaging panorama of a homogeneous literary world in England—an intimate intellectual milieu in which certain writers practiced their arts, shared opinions in letters and conversation, tutored one another, and enjoyed a rich shared family and social life. Margaret Woods, at her home in Oxford and later on Boar’s Hill, entertained Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater among other writers, artists, and scholars. Mary Coleridge, a highly...