Although they wowed the English literary scene during their fleeting moment in the sun, the Georgian poets are now regarded (alas) as merely minor. Named to commemorate the reigning monarch King George V and to suggest that they were the beginning... [more]
Although they wowed the English literary scene during their fleeting moment in the sun, the Georgian poets are now regarded (alas) as merely minor. Named to commemorate the reigning monarch King George V and to suggest that they were the beginning of another Georgian period 'which may take rank' with several great poetic ages of the past,' the group was a less-than-auspicious collective of timid pastoralists. Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, and A. E. Housman produced five anthologies of uncontroversial verse that recorded personal experiences in common speech. Their oeuvre was traditional in style and form, and it focused on the bucolic, the domestic, and the unthreatening -- content that quickly seemed old fashioned after the outbreak of World War I.
Their style, which sought to express emotional truths without being too public or too private, was far afield from the storm-troopings of rabid Dadaists, Surrealists, and Vorticists who were concurrently challenging every aesthetic convention. In the history of Western poetry, the Georgian poets are lost in the shadow of Eliot, Pound, and other Modernist writers whose experimentalism they eschewed in the name of decorum.
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