London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
And poetry time.
September 20th, 1912.
A handful of poets and poetry people sit down to lunch in London.
Nothing particularly remarkable about that.
Except that by the time they get up from the table, they’ve more or less invented a literary movement.
Well, invented may be putting it a bit strongly.
Because the whole thing had started the day before.
With a joke.
And with Rupert Brooke.
Young, brilliant, beautiful Rupert Brooke.
He was 25 years old. Already a coming man. And on September 19th he floated a wonderfully mischievous idea to his friend Edward Marsh.
Why not publish a book of startlingly new, unconventional poetry?
Brooke’s poetry.
But pretend it had been written by twelve different poets.
Twelve imaginary poets.
Different names. Different identities. One Rupert Brooke.
It would, he thought, shock the public.
Edward Marsh heard him out.
Marsh was a fascinating figure. Civil servant. Patron of the arts. Private secretary to Winston Churchill at the Admiralty.
And a man with an extraordinarily good nose for poetry.
And Marsh’s response was essentially:
Rupert, why make the poets up?
We’ve got the real thing.
There were good young poets all over the place whose work needed an audience.
And so the following day, September 20th, 1912, they sat down to lunch.
Brooke and Marsh were there.
So was Harold Monro, editor of the Poetry Review.
Arundel del Re, his assistant editor.
Wilfrid Gibson.
And John Drinkwater.
And out of that London lunch came a book.
Georgian Poetry, 1911–1912.
Now stop there.
Because Georgian can send us galloping off in completely the wrong direction.
Not George I.
Not George II.
Not George III.
Not George IV.
This was George V.
He’d been crowned the previous year, 1911.
A new George.
A new Georgian age.
And, they hoped, a new poetry.
And since we’re here, let’s have George as our word of the day.
It’s a very old name.
It comes ultimately from the Greek geōrgos.
A farmer.
A husbandman.
Literally, an earth-worker.
Gē, earth or land.
Ergon, work.
Earth-worker.
Which is quite a journey for a word.
From somebody working the soil in the ancient Greek world…
to St George…
to kings of England…
and finally to a bunch of young poets sitting down to lunch in London and deciding, in effect, that Georgian was going to mean modern.
And here’s another twist.
Harold Monro had actually coined the expression “Georgian poets” the previous year, the coronation year of George V.
And Monro matters.
He may, in fact, matter rather more to this story than he normally gets credit for.
Because just a few weeks before that lunch, he’d taken a house in Bloomsbury.
He was going to turn it into something rather wonderful.
The Poetry Bookshop.
Think about that.
A shop devoted to poetry.
But more than a shop.
A meeting place.
A publishing house.
A place where young poets could meet one another, read one another, argue, perform, publish and sell their work.
And that gives our story some London pavement.
Bloomsbury.
That extraordinary patch of London where books and ideas and people kept bumping into one another.
The Poetry Bookshop was about to become another little London engine room of ideas.
And Monro readily agreed to publish the proposed anthology.
They even settled on the title at that September 20th lunch.
Georgian Poetry, 1911–1912.
Edward Marsh would edit it.
If it lost money, Marsh would cover the losses himself.
If it made money, the profits would be shared.
And then the project nearly came off the rails before it had even left the station.
The Poetry Society sacked Monro.
Apparently he was too progressive for them.
Too progressive!
Remember that.
Because before very long, people would be accusing the Georgian poets of being anything but progressive.
But the anthology survived.
Publication was delayed.
And in the middle of December 1912, the first copies of Georgian Poetry, 1911–1912 went on sale.
And something extraordinary happened.
People bought it.
Lots of people bought it.
To the astonishment of Marsh and the poets themselves.
Because this stuff felt new.
That’s the thing we have to remember.
Today, Georgian poetry can sound cosy.
A little safe.
Perhaps a little tea-and-meadow-ish.
It didn’t sound like that in 1912.
This was the New Poetry.
It wasn’t Victorian.
Away with the grand rhetoric.
Away with the earnest moralising.
Away with the languor and introspection.
This poetry looked outward.
It had energy.
It had colour.
It had confidence.
It had air in its lungs.
D. H. Lawrence was ecstatic.
He said:
“We are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning.”
What a line.
And Lawrence wasn’t standing outside looking in.
He was one of them.
He appeared in four of the five Georgian Poetry anthologies.
And look at some of the other names that passed through those volumes.
Walter de la Mare.
John Masefield.
Rupert Brooke, of course.
Later Robert Graves.
Siegfried Sassoon.
Even a short poem by Isaac Rosenberg.
Ezra Pound was invited.
That didn’t go so well.
Pound and Marsh couldn’t agree on a suitable poem.
And Pound soon became thoroughly scornful of the Georgians.
Indeed, his own Imagist anthology would become something of a counterblast to them.
And there’s the great wheel of literary fashion beginning to turn.
Because movements have a nasty habit of ageing considerably faster than the people in them.
In 1912, these were the new boys.
The insurgents.
The people kicking open the windows and letting fresh air into English poetry.
And then history kicked the door in.
The First World War.
Rupert Brooke went to war.
And in April 1915, aged just 27, he died.
Not in battle.
He died of blood poisoning from an infected mosquito bite aboard a French hospital ship in the Aegean.
He was buried on the Greek island of Skyros.
And suddenly the beautiful young moving spirit of Georgian Poetry was gone.
The second Georgian anthology appeared later that year.
It was dedicated to Brooke and another dead poet, James Elroy Flecker.
And still the books sold.
That second volume sold 19,000 copies.
The biggest sale of the whole series.
More volumes followed.
And the cast changed.
Sassoon came in.
Graves came in.
Rosenberg appeared.
War poetry appeared.
But Edward Marsh didn’t want too much ugliness.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, something happened.
The thing that had been young…
got older.
The thing that had been daring…
got safer.
The thing that had been a rebellion…
became an establishment.
And eventually even the word Georgian changed its flavour.
It became a sneer.
A put-down.
Yesterday’s poetry.
Safe poetry.
“Weekend poetry”, as one contemptuous description had it.
And now comes the ending.
And I love this ending.
November 1922.
Edward Marsh publishes the fifth and final volume of Georgian Poetry.
The experiment that had begun over lunch ten years earlier was coming to an end.
And one month before that final volume appeared, another poem had been published.
A poem that began:
“April is the cruellest month…”
T. S. Eliot.
The Waste Land.
Think about those dates.
October 1922.
The Waste Land.
November 1922.
The last Georgian Poetry.
You could hardly stage it better.
One literary age walking onto the stage…
just as another is heading for the exit.
And that, perhaps, is the part of the story worth remembering.
Because it’s terribly easy to look backwards and laugh at yesterday’s modernism.
To forget how modern it once was.
The Georgian poets didn’t set out to be old-fashioned.
Quite the reverse.
In 1912 they were opening the windows.
They were the fresh air.
They were the new voices.
The new generation.
The new century.
And it all began with a joke from a 25-year-old poet.
Followed the next day by lunch.
September 20th, 1912.
A few men sitting round a table in London.
A conversation.
An idea.
A book.
And for ten years…
a new name for English poetry.
Georgian.
George V gave them the name.
Though, as we now know, somewhere far, far underneath it…
there’s an ancient Greek farmer…
working the earth.
And on that note…
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
Streets Ahead.
See ya tomorrow.