Non-Modernists

Independent-minded commentators have voiced discontent with the modernist revolution in English poetry. In Image and Experience (1960) Graham Hough complained that an American-led invasion had wrecked the continuity of native traditions, marking a 'detour, a diversion from the main road'. He added with a challenging note of matter-of-factness: 'traffic along the main road has been proceeding all the time, and we do not sufficiently remember this'.¹ Others, notably Philip Larkin in his Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), selected a canon in which nostalgia for a disappearing Englishness appeared to many observers as a defensive chauvinism. When one considers, however, the deaths of the First World War poet-combatants—Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen—it is not difficult to find reasons why British cultural memory yearned for a world in which modernism had not taken the high ground.

In fact, the aftermath of the 'Great War' reshaped London's literary establishment more gradually, and less dramatically, than most academic histories have acknowledged. In 1912, in the preface to the first volume of Georgian Poetry, Edward Marsh excitedly proclaimed that English poetry was entering a period 'which may take rank in due time with the several great poetic ages of the past'.² This confidence was reciprocated by an appreciative public. The second volume, dedicated to the memory of Marsh's close friend Brooke, sold over 19,000 copies. However, three anthologies later in 1922 (the year of The Waste Land), Marsh assumed an apologetic air, claiming his incapacity for the roles of 'a pundit, or a pontiff, or a Petronius Arbiter'.³ This disclaimer marked an awareness of the growing divide between his choice of those contemporaries who mattered and the advance guard beginning to attract the honorific epithet 'modernist'. Laura Riding and Robert Graves's A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) labelled the Georgian anthologies 'an English dead movement', one that had apparently expired before it was sold.⁴

What ultimately consigned Marsh's Georgian anthologies to posterity was the disapproval of T. S. Eliot. In a series of articles published in The Egoist, Eliot brilliantly and tendentiously anatomised the failings of what he characterised as 'the annual scourge of the Georgian Anthology'. He claimed the Georgians took no notice of developments in foreign poetry: by contrast, their concentration on the English countryside marked them as incurably provincial, even 'inbred'. Moreover, he argued that Georgian poetry was insipidly 'pleasant': prefabricated flutter usurping the artistic expression of deep emotion. Eliot contended that the Georgians' penchant for the word 'oriflamme' would not purify the dialect of the tribe.⁵ By 1919, he was writing reviews of recent anthologies under the heading of 'Post-Georgian Poetry'. The severity of this dismissal passed into academic orthodoxy, thanks largely to the crusades of F. R. Leavis, whose enormously influential New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) repeatedly referred to the 'poetical' stock scenery—birds and trees and flowers—of Georgian verse.⁶ For 'poetical' read 'namby-pamby'.

It needs to be said that Eliot did less than justice to the range and innovation of Georgian poetry. He quoted the opening of Brooke's 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester'

Just now the lilac is in bloom, All before my little room;

as evidence of the 'littleness' or triviality of the Georgian preoccupation with English rural landscapes,⁷ but he ignored the sardonic flippancy displayed by this homesick persona (the poem was written in a Berlin café). Eliot's dislike of the propagandist cult of Brooke—propelled by Churchill's encomium—perhaps accounts for his lack of attention to the bracing war poems published in the Georgian anthologies. The volume he damned as 'pleasant' contained Siegfried Sassoon's address to Robert Graves, mentioning the front where 'Rifles crack and bullets flick', completing the rhyme: 'Bones are smashed and buried quick'—hardly very pleasant. Yet the modernist taunts directed at 'Georgianism...