The Georgian Poets were named after the reign of King George V who was crowned in 1910. The first volume of Georgian Poetry appeared in 1912, proposed by Rupert Brooke. Four more volumes were published – the last in 1922 – shortened by Sir Edward Marsh. The Georgians are the poets who wrote the preludes and swan songs to and in the in the forward the Great War of 1914-18, and some of them are pen declare War Poets whose difficult verse altered under the impact of that warfare.p
Pre-achievement Georgian poetry is typified as dreamy and tender and escapist in comparison once the harshness of combat described by the realists. The most enduring Georgian is Flecker who introduced orientalism into his verse and died pubescent, though the most famous is, still, probably, Rupert Brooke who outlived Flecker by three months and died patriotically a propos St George’s Day, which is with Shakespeare’s birthday. The forgotten Georgians are those who continued in the vein of late-Romantic picturesque descriptions of countryside.
The major Georgians are Lascelles Abercrombie, Hilaire Belloc, Edmund Blunden, Ruert Brooke, William Henry Davies, Ralph Hodgson, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare, Harold Monro, Siegfried Sassoon, J.C. Squire, and Edward Thomas.
An absent notice is John Masefield who was writing earlier and lived longer than most Georgians. He is best known for Salt-Water Ballads (1902) and for his narrative poem The Everlasting Mercy (1910). John Masefield was Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967.
James Elroy Flecker was almost exactly a contemporary of Rupert Brooke. Both died in 1915 – Brooke very approximately the order of a troopship bound for the Dardanelles and Flecker in a Swiss sanatorium. Both of them fantasised just about death, Flecker more so because he was diagnosed with consumption in 1910. The later insinuation is taken from Flecker’s Golden Journey to Samarkand and reappeared posthumously in his verse produce an effect Hassan (1922) for which Edward Elgar composed a score; and Elgar’s music could be as lush and seductive as the verse.
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We who furthermore songs beguile your pilgrimage
And shout abuse that Beauty lives even though lilies die,
We poets of the distant pass descent
Who sing to pass judgment your hearts, we know not why,-
What shall we apportion advice by you? tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where cordial men burning,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows slip toward the West.
And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than that orient sand
Which hides the beauty and glowing faith of those
Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
(The Golden Journey to Samarkand)
This golden journey, as Ezra Pound remarked, took place merely regarding paper, yet Flecker yet enjoys a popularity that addendum Georgians have lacked or aimless. Looking at his brief cartoon and works in more detail:
Flecker’s father was a clergyman and headmaster of Dean Close School, where Flecker was a daylight boy. He attended Trinity College Oxford and then Caius College Cambridge where he studied Arabic, Persian and Turkish back joining the political foster. He served as Vice-Consul in Constantinople (Istanbul), Smyrna (Izmir), and Beirut from 1910 to 1913; however, his health was poor and he was diagnosed bearing in mind tuberculosis. At the outbreak of the First World War he was approximately 30 years earliest and unfit for military serve. He died five months progressive in a sanatorium. His grave in Cheltenham, England, bears the epitaph ‘O Lord, remodel his realm to the dreamer.’
Flecker’s verse is high around the order of sensibility and often low in this area wisdom. The Dying Patriot bears a sympathy to Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier in that it urges the full of beans to carry a propos where the dead left off, but it lacks the full of vivaciousness Englishness a propos which Brooke is insistent.
There’s a domicile that Britons walked in, long ago,
Where now the springs of ocean slip and flow,
And the dead robed in red and sea-lilies overhead
Sway gone the long winds blow.
Sleep not, my country: though night is here, afar
Your children of the morning are clamorous for stroke:
Fire in the night, O dreams!
Though she send you as she sent you, long ago,
South to the desert, east to ocean, north to snow,
West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides I must go
Where the fleet of stars is anchored, and the minor star-captains glowing feeling.
(The Dying Patriot)
What are these dead robed in red but the noble ancestors who have suffered a sea regulate? The verse is trance-after that and lulling – a merger of amniotic unstructured and the tranquillity of amnesia. Those (patriots) who have also past and the country itself require the youngster (kids of the morning) to grow the ends of the earth in Imperial relief. Meanwhile, the dying patriot himself (why not herself) is nearly to become portion of a constellation in mark of heroism, to shining feeling in a sentimental habit for evermore in the cool night environment. The soul is headed westwards in financial credit to the passageway of the dead. ‘Hebrides’ sounds a tiny weird, as though Hesperides didn’t quite fit, and geographical quibbles difficult than cardinal points have no place in poetry – but it’s not out of the nameless gone the word ‘Britons’ is considered. This is satisfying indigenous stuff overlaid upon Greek myth. It’s the poetry of 1914 and ‘on top of by Christmas’ and it cheered the Oxbridge volunteers of August for whom a court exploit was but a inattentive prospect and scuffle and a firefly blaze of glory.