The Neo-Pagans

...escape back into youth, fascinated us...

...We imagined a number of young people, splendidly young together, vowing to live such an idea, parting to do their 'work in the world' . . . and then, twenty years later, meeting . . . reborn to find and make a new world together...

...These people never had any precisely articulated credo, as Paul Delany's many repetitions of Woolf s term might suggest, but in general for the stodginess of their elders they hoped to substitute youthful spontaneity, for the dreariness of modern urban life, a love of nature and solitude, and for accepted social practices, such new accommodations as swimming together naked...

...Sexual alliances seemed unimportant at first, but after a while they appeared a necessary concomitant of youth and paganism...

...And in a similar vein, Delany does not mention at all the essays Brooke wrote on John Donne, which influenced—indeed, may have determined—T...

...mark TAYLOR is professor of English at Manhattan College...

...In fact, the hopes of 1909 had been slain by their own contradictions, long before...

...S. Eliot's famous and enduring formulations about metaphysical sensibility (as J. E. Duncan showed almost thirty years ago...

...The Neo-pagans faced a major paradox...

...Delany twice mentions Brooke's study of John Webster but does not suggest that the monograph was important pioneering work in the resurrection, early in this century, of the Jacobean dramatists...

...How long could the girls they,loved go on hinting that they would embrace sensuality some day — but not yet...

...Delany describes the stresses male passion produced in the collective ideal: "Because the young women . . . expected to remain chaste until they married, the collective spirit of the Neo-pagans kept sexuality in the background, or even tried to deny it altogether...

...One does not learn here that at least some of them were exceptionally gifted...

...The vision of community that Rupert Brooke and the others represented showed an utterly a- or pre-sexual spirit, and as Delany writes, "the Neo-pagan ideal of comradeship was bound to clash with the realities of sexual desire and possessivness in young men and women alike...

...Mark Taylor ' irginia Woolf applied the term "Neopagans," which had been used a generation earlier of the PreRaphaelites, to a group of young men and women who became close friends at Cambridge around 1908...

...The Neo-pagans were far more oldfashioned and puritanical in attitude than they chose to admit, and their inability to live comfortably in either the former age or the new one temporarily powerless to be born, made them, especially Rupert Brooke, thoroughly miserable much of the time...

...JOSEPH M. POWERS is professor of sacramental theology at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California...

...Doubtless there is much truth in this contention that all was not well with the Neo-pagans by 1914, but Delany's study fails to make these young men and women important enough to us that their difficulties can matter much...

...If one bears in mind how young these folks were when they found each other — around twenty or younger — none of these idealistic sentiments should sound either unusual or too silly...

...18 December 1987: 759 fatuity that one wonders what drove the author to his labors or'what he supposes will attract most readers to this portrait...

...But they do reveal a great if understandable ignorance of the variety of human feelings...

...One was not made old just by living long, but by accepting a place in society without protest...

...Although marriage was one enemy of their youth, it was only within marriage that the women would be willing to surrender their virginity...

...His thesis is that Brooke never did succeed in working out his woman problems (greatly exacerbated by the demands of his very strong mother and ardent and not entirely unsuccessful persuit of various honmosexuals...

...But the young men were becoming impatient with this sexual moratorium...

...Their Neo-paganism was, as Delany writes, "an appealing new version of the ubiquitous 'rural myth,' that specially British form of escape from modernity," and it was this strength born of their youth, they thought, that would make this escape possible...

...the pieces collected as Letters from America offer a young Englishman's remarkable account of his observations in the States and the islands of the Pacific...

...The great lie of the Rupert Brooke myth," Delany writes, "was that the vernal optimism of 1909 was still untarnished in 1914, when it was brutally crushed by the war...

...The "Rupert Brooke myth" can no longer have so strong a hold on the imagination that it cries out for demolition...

...Their great aim," Delany comments, "was to throw off the natural accumulations of age: houses, jobs, spouses, children...

...even so he deserves more than the judgment that he "was a better poet than most of the Georgians, and less simple-minded about his enthusiasms...

...Brooke is a minor poet — probably a minor minor rather than a major minor poet...

...Out West, prompted by the photograph of an old Indian woman named Laughing Earth, Brooke wrote that "old age is Only a different kind of merriment from youth, and a wiser," an observation to which we might give at least as serious attention as to his mindless praise of the young...

...The Rupert Brooke who emerges in this book, insofar as he is distinct from any other confused young man trying to understand himself and to get his girlfriend to say yes to sex, is a creature of such unbelievable REVIEWERS JOHN A. COLEMAN, S. J., is professor of religion and society at the Jesuit School of Theology and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, His forthcoming book, edited with Gregory Baum, is Religion and Party Politics (Fortress...

...Their youth was something even the years could not make them surrender...

...This misery, its causes (some of which I have outlined), and its consequences are much of the story Delany tells...

...Brooke was a superb essayist and travel writer...

...CARL MITCHAM directs the Philosophy and Technology Studies Center and Polytechnic University in New York...

...Despite some long-delayed but triumphant consummations, when he went off to war in 1914, he did so in the main, not because of the glorious motives usually ascribed to him (after his death Winston Churchill called him "all that one would wish England's noblest sons to be"), but to escape his own problems...

...Brooke's prolonged juvenile enthusiasms, his posturings, and his hysterical outbursts interest us, I hope, only because he did good things in spite of them...

...Of Brooke's really laudable accomplishments and of his intellectual life in general there is scarcely a word in The Neo-pagans...

...He has published books on Shakespeare and George Herbert...

...This group included Rupert Brooke, Justin Brooke (no relation), Frances Darwin Cornford, Gwen Darwin Raverat (both granddaughters of Sir Charles), Jacques Raverat, Katherine or "Ka" Cox, and the four Olivier sisters of whom the most prominent, for Neo-pagan purposes at least, were Brynhild and Noel...

...In a letter Rupert Brooke wrote: "The idea, the splendor of...