Poetic Centrists

...As a group, the Georgians were far less engaging than their radical opposition - the Futurists, Vorticists, and Imagists who stirred literary London in the years immediately preceding World War I-and, individually, they were overshadowed by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Edith Sitwell, all of whom were sharply critical of Marsh's anthologies...

...Poetic Centrists THE GEORGIAN REVOLT: RISE AND F"ALL OF" A POETIC IDEAL, 1910-1922 By Robert H. Ross Southern Illinois University Press...

...These strictures were not entirely fair, of course, as Robert H. Ross makes clear in this judicious history of the Georgians...

...They find little to inspire them in Marsh's anthologies, which seem increasingly unreal...

...Eliot, for example, attacked the Georgians on the score of "pleasantness": He said they "caressed" everything they touched...

...To say all this, however, is not to deny the value of Ross's job of literary exhumation...

...Agreement, after all, is unnecessary...

...Any mention of the nest of a singing- bird threw the community into a frenzy...

...Reviewed by STEPHEN STEPANCHEV Author, "American Poetry Since 1945: A Critical Survey" George v inherited the throne of England in 1910, at a time when the arts of painting, music and poetry were in vigorous revival all over Europe and America, and gave his name to one of the more enterprising groups of the decade, "the Georgian poets...

...If they learn anything at all from them, it is to avoid the easy response, the unexamined subject, and to work with materials that engage them profoundly, that arise from their own existential predicament, whatever its character...

...They were reacting against the sonorities of Victorian poetry and the lassitude of the fin de siecle esthetes...

...Much of the disrepute into which the Georgians have fallen is due to the inferior quality of the verse that Marsh published in the last two of his anthologies...

...Ross offers facts, but not merely facts...

...he provides facts illuminated by judgment, taste, a love of excellence...

...Ross denies that the Georgians were the "lark-lovers" they were made out to be by their enemies...

...These letters have given Ross a clearer insight into the ambitions and political maneuvers of the poets of 1910-1922 than many of the participants could have had...

...They simply did not produce enough poems worthy of emulation, and they were not strong or bold enough in pushing their point of view, their sense of what the situation in poetry called for...

...Edith Sitwell accused them of a fake Romanticism that focused on an uninvestigated countryside...

...They worked in traditional metrics, to be sure, but aimed to revitalize them...

...So far as the poets of the '60s are concerned-c-committed as they are to "the confessional mode," "the breath line," and "the subjective image" - the true ancestors are Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...

...Those who admired Eliot (like Robert Lowell) and those who admired Pound (like Charles Olson) were not necessarily in accord with their points of view, but they sensed the value of an all-encompassing philosophy that supports a poem both as a whole and in detail...

...these contained slick, unimaginative, imitative poems that were completely out of touch with the realities of the years following World War 1: They were quite unlike the first three volumes, which reflected the actual world (in the war poems, for instance) . The Georgians have had no influence on the practice of the poets who followed them in the inter-war period and in the years after World War II...

...They could learn how to handle free verse by studying Pound and how to suggest the flow of consciousness with images in free association by reading Eliot's Prufrock or The Waste Land...

...the 20th-century reader enjoys Paradise Lost without subscribing to Milton's Calvinism...

...They could learn how to suppress the first term of their metaphors and create emotion-charged symbols...

...They used the diction of their own day, insisted on the importance of emotion, and valued a realistic depiction of natural and urban scenes...

...The historian frequently has this sort of advantage...

...it shows how insensitive any wholesale dismissal of the Georgians is...

...His book is useful in a way that history sometimes is: It corrects the record...

...But, inevitably, there were many others among them, poets like W. J. Turner, John Freeman, and 1. C. Squires, whose verses gave no particular luster to the movement and are now forgotten...

...He does succeed in giving us a clear impression of one of the most important decades in Anglo-American literary history...

...These poets were published in a series of five anthologies (in 1912, 1915, 1917, 1919, and 1922) edited by Edward Marsh, a wealthy, influential amateur of the arts who liked poetry that was modern, but not "too modern...

...Although they were, in general, moderate and "Centrist" in poetic theory and practice, the Georgians thought of themselves as part of a revolution in English poetry...

...Moreover, their vision of life, their philosophy, was superficial, incapable of giving structure to the complex data that their senses reported (this was true of all except D. H. Lawrence, who gave expression to his vision of blood-reality chiefly in his prose) . By contrast, both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound exerted an enormous influence on the practice of younger poets, partly because of their powerful poetic personalities and partly because they had a set of profound philosophical convictions that helped to give order to the fragmented world they saw around them...

...Birds," she said, "became a cult...

...To be sure, he does not present full-scale critical analyses of poetic texts, but these would be inappropriate to his task...

...They could learn to produce not only new wine but also new bottles, of various shapes, in which to keep it...

...In a technical sense, too, the younger poets could learn a great deal more from Pound and Eliot than from, say, Ralph Hodgson or Rupert Brooke...

...Some of the poets who appeared in these anthologies were men of impressive talent who are still being read and admired, among them Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, John Masefield, Ralph Hodgson, and Rupert Brooke...

...He has made a scholarly effort to discover the shape and character of the movement by examining not only the Marsh anthologies and other works by the poets included in them, but also a number of works by poets who were opposed to Marsh, and collections of letters written by the princi pal figures in the raging controversies of 1910 (notably the Marsh letters in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library...

...and he does not essay his own opinion when a convenient quotation is available: This, no doubt, is a form of scholarly modesty...