A New Date for the Rhymers' Club

155 NOTES AND COMMENTS 1. THE SOURCE FOR MOORE'S TITLE, THE UNTITLED FIELD. Ey Sister Eileen Kennedy, S.C. (College of Saint Elizabeth). While George Koore was writing in 1901 and 1902 the short stories that would appear in his important volume. The Untllled Field, he dallied with several titles like "The Passing of the Gael" and the even more "flamboyant" "The Sin Against the Holy Ghost" before he circled back to an early choice. The Untllled Field. Several writers have noticed the similarity between this title and one used by Turgenev, the strongest influence on Moore while he was writing The Untllled Field. The Russian master called one of his novels a title frequently translated into English as Virgin Soil. Perhaps, too, but this is less likely, Koore could have had at the back of his mind Psalm 65 in which God is thanked for His bounty - "the untllled meadows overflow with a rich harvest." But I would like to suggest a more direct source, one from an early influence on Koore, a poet who remained a favorite, Shelley. Summoned on a messianic mission, as Moore recreated it in 'Hall and Farewell!· he went to Ireland to liberate a people from the tyranny of Catholicism - and he found there a peasantry, priest-ridden and poverty-stricken. As Moore sketched his tales of the poor, quite possibly the words from Sheîley's sonnet, another hymn against tyranny, "England in 1819," echoed in the short-story writer's ear. The seventh line of the poem reads: "A people starved and stabbed in the untllled field - » And the eleventh line tells of "Religion Christless, Godless - a book sealed." Certainly most of those I903 stories describe a Joyless religion imprisoning a cowed people, and I submit that Shelley's sonnet most nearly parallels the situation Moore found. 2. A NEW DATE FOR THE RHYMERS' CLUE. By Daniel Rutenberg (University of South Florida). The history of the Rhymers' Club, that group of London poets which included, among others, W. B. Yeats, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, and Lionel Johnson, is so undocumented that even the Club's duration is uncertain. The Rhymers did not meet after 1894, when The Second Book of the Rhymers' Club was published. On this scholars agree. But as to the Club's inception, the date is questionable. Recent students of the •nineties prefer 1891, but there are few data to support that 156 year. Instead, the preponderance of evidence indicates that the Rhymers' Club was founded in 1890. The principal source of information on this fugitive group is the recollections of its members. Ernest Rhys, a Rhymer, had come to London in January, 1886:2 "It was in my fourth winter that the Rhymers' Club was set going at the Chesire Cheese in Fleet Street."3 Writing forty years after the event, Rhys might have been imprecise, yet an error of two years would be required to Justify the 1891 date. Yeats has attributed the founding of the Rhymers' Club to a statement he made "soon after the publication of The Wanderings of Olsln" to Rhys, the man "who had set [him] to compile tales of the Irish fairies."^ This work appearing'in 1889, 1891 seems late for the group's organization. Richard Le Gallienne, also a member, recollects a Rhymers' Club evening when, for the few minutes before the meeting began, Lionel Johnson captivated the early arrivals with his conversation. Le Gallienne writes that Johnson was then twenty-three.0 His birth date was March 15, I867. This chronology also implies an I89O date for the meeting. Furthermore, the epilogue to The Book of the Rhymers' Club is subtitled "First Anniversary of the Rhymers' Club." Since the anthology was in proof in December, 1891, we have strong internal evidence for the earlier year, 1890, as the date the Rhymers' Club was founded.' Rhys's, Yeats's and Le Gallienne's statements collectively point to 1890, while the traditional date of I89I has little explicit foundation. True, Yeats has commented that "the Rhymers' Club . . . first met, I think, a few months before the death of Tennyson [October 6, 1892] and lasted seven or eight years."0 But Yeats...