Georgians at Work and in Love

BOOK REVIEWS StUl, it is good to see interest in the Bloomsbury Group going beyond the preoccupation with early twentieth century gossip and entering seriously into our considerations of literary modernism. For this Edward L. Bishop and the Bruccoli Clark Layman group are to be thanked. S. P. Rosenbaum --------------------- University of Toronto Georgians at Work and in Love Keith Clark. The Muse Colony: Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and Friends: Dymock—1914. Bristol: Redcliffe, 1992. vi+127 pp. £7.50 Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier 1909-1915. Pippa Harris, ed. New York: Crown, 1991. xxviii + 302 pp. $40.00 THAT A SMALL GROUP of Georgian poets gathered briefly in a vUlage in Gloucestershire on the eve of World War I is not as well known as are similar gatherings of writers in other genres—the group of novelists that centered around Henry James in Wye some fourteen years before, for one. That Gloucestershire vUlage, Dymock, is not, for example , mentioned in David Perkins's otherwise exhaustive A History of Modern Poetry. In The Muse Colony, Keith Clark attempts to correct this situation. Its full title is somewhat misleading, since the first author listed, Brooke, never really was a permanent part of any "colony" that gathered there. His main reason for visiting that neighborhood was to assist in the production of New Numbers, the most important series of Georgian poetry, after Edward Marsh's eponymous succession of volumes . Since Brooke—for good or Ul—is stUl the most important figure among the Georgians (which is not to say the most important poet), leading off with his name and picture on the cover ensures more notice than the less famUiar (and less prepossessing) faces of Lascelles Abercrombie or Wilfred Gibson, who were much more integral to the Dymock scene, such as it was. The audience for this handsomely produced volume is the general reader, since Clark presents a great deal of otherwise famUiar background information in the first chapter, and includes throughout the complete texts of many poems, some famUiar (Frost's "Birches"), others more obscure (Gibson's "DaffodUs"). With such an audience in mind, he has a perfect opportunity to correct some key misperceptions that have been held about the Georgians since T. S. Eliot in 1918 accused them of substituting "Georgian emotions for human ones," misperceptions that Robert Ross (The Georgian Revolt) and Myron Simon {The Georgian 75 ELT 37:1 1994 Poetic) have attempted to rectify. But whUe Clark does point out that many Georgian poems are more realistic in treatment and subject matter than has been commonly perceived, the poems that he chooses to reproduce tend to reinforce the stereotype of the Georgians as watered -down Romantics. The most noticeable examples are the nature poems. The problem, as Perkins has noted, is that when Wordsworth or other Romantics write about flowers and other natural objects, they are referring to a whole host of fresh intimations about immanence and nature; when Georgians refer to them, they are alluding chiefly to previous Romantic poems. The final poem Clarke includes, W. H. Davies's The High-Road," with its impregnable naivete (To all the roads I know Delightful haunts belong"), only serves to remind us why much of Georgian poetry remains unread and unstudied. The best part of Clark's book concerns the stories about the poets' friendships and assistance to each other, particularly the Frost-Thomas relationship, which reveals Frost in an uncharacteristically generous light, and reminds us that Thomas has been an undersung poetic loss of the Great War. Why Frost withdrew to the English countryside is stUl not precisely clear; it does not appear to be solely for bucolic reasons, since he told Donald Hall that it was to avoid Ezra Pound, and Frost's wife objected to the way other poets had pestered them—if Dymock was a country retreat, the emphasis was to be on the latter. Thus Frost's attentions and advice to Thomas are all the more striking. Less satisfying is Clark's portrayal of Brooke; he presents in their entirety several of Brooke's contributions to New Numbers with little comment about their significance to Brooke...