( 1 1 ) G e o r g i a n P o e t r y
(Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, Harold Monro, John Masefield)
[See also T h e T w e n t i e t h C e n t u r y in Topic 13]
W a l t e r d e l a M a r e ( 1 8 7 3 - 1 9 5 6 )
Imagination
- two types of imagination:
- (a) childlike: intuitive and inductive > visionary poetry
- (b) boylike: logical and deductive > intellectual poetry
- prefers the childlike type of imagination himself
Poetry
Pecacock Pie (1913), Tom Tiddler's Ground (1932), This Year: Next Year (1937)
- coll. of children's poetry
- style: direct and fluent songlike manner
"The Listeners"
- his most famous narrative poem
- conc.: a stranger comes to a house to deliver a message and fulfil a promise but finds the house empty
- "the listeners" = the probably only imaginary hearers of the stranger's knocking and calling
also wrote: short stories and novels
E d w a r d T h o m a s ( 1 8 7 8 – 1 9 1 7 )
L i f e :
- a gifted lit. critic, esp. good in reviewing poetry
- the 1st to salute the new stars incl. W(illiam) H(enry) Davies (1871 – 1940, a Welsh poet and the ‘Super-Tramp’), Robert Frost (1874 – 1963), and Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)
- T.: poetry = the highest form of lit. x but: no serious attempt to write poems himself until the autumn 1914
- started writing poetry under the stress of deciding whether or not to enlist, on encouragement by R. Frost
- enlisted for the attraction of the soldier salary to enhance his meagre income from selling his books and review copies, and for his feelings of patriotism
- killed in the Western Front by the blast of a shell
W o r k :
- ed. of 16 anthologies and oth. ed., author of 30 prose books on nature, and of some poetry
- < Richard Jefferies (1848 – 1888, an E journalist and countryside fiction writer)
- his love of southern En. and its seasons, celebrated in his prose, distilled to a purer form in his poetry
- his awareness of the richness and beauty of the natural world intensified by a sense of impending loss and the certainty of death
- perceptive to the violence done by a distant conflict to the natural order of things: an acute observer of the suffering occasioned by war at home and on the battlefield, and of death as the ultimate destroyer of the already violent co-operation of man and nature
- history implicit in his humanised landscape, the ingrained past can be read in nature: his landscapes haunted by the ghosts of past occupants and users (both animals and human), and expressive the evidence of exploitation, work, and decay
- plain diction, style, and rhythm characteristic of both his prose and poetry
“Rain”:
- < curiously indebted to his earlier prose writings
“Adlestrop”:
- evokes a disappearing En. through which the poet passes merely as a traveller
“A Tale”:
- ambiguously contrasts the growing blue periwinkles x broken blue china plates amid the ruins of a cottage
“Digging”:
- ‘let[s] down…into the earth’ the clay pipe of a soldier and that of the narrator
- = as if their clay were that of human bodies joined in a common burial
“As the Team’s Head-Brass”:
- develops a sporadic conversation conc. the war btw a ploughman and his team at work x the narrator
- interrupted each time the ploughman returns to his work, and the war, somewhere over a horizon = suggests more drastic breakings
“Lights Out”:
- transl. the military command into a journey through a dark wood ‘where all must lose / Their way
- the unnatural silence of the wood = a sense of loss of direction and the violated self
H a r o l d M o n r o ( 1 8 7 9 - 1 9 3 2 )
- founded the Poetry Bookshop (1912) in London: helped many of the poets of his time (e.g. W. Owen), publ. many of the works at his own expense, hardly made any profit at all
- founded The Poetry Review: an influential poetry magazine
Twentieth Century Poetry (1933)
- his own poetry anthology
- incl. his own poems + poems by e.g. E. Thomas, J. Masefield, W. de la Mare, W. Owen, T. S. Eliot etc.
Georgian Poetry
- as a collab. of Edward Marsh's (1872 - 1953) anthology
J o h n M a s e f i e l d ( 1 8 7 8 - 1 9 6 7 )
- Poet Laureate (1930 - 67) in succession to R. Bridges
- preocc.: variety, wilderness and desolation of the sea (< spent several years as a sailor)
- uses sea-language
Salt-Water Ballads (1902)
- his 1st coll. of poems
- incl. "Sea Fever": one of the most commonly cited and anthologized individual poems of the time
The Everlasting Mercy (1910), Reynard the Fox (1919):
- long narrative poems
- the latter criticises fox hunting
also wrote: plays, novels, non-fiction