Georgian

2 Key excerpts on "Georgian"

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  eBook - ePub

  Literature and Culture in Modern Britain

  Volume 1: 1900-1929

  • Clive Bloom(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The hostile reception of Georgian poetry needs to be understood within the context of the broad social, economic and political developments of the time, particularly the growth of international monopoly capitalism. The assault by the modernists on the Georgians is, in part, a reflection of this move away from a national to a more international outlook, precipitated, in the final analysis, by changes in the economic organization of capitalism. Cosmopolitan culture grows as national ones wither and a sense of roodessness drives out a sense of belonging. On this analysis, Georgianism is an anachronism the moment it appears. But a deeper irony afflicts modernism which, while symptomatic of historically progressive forces, is nevertheless opposed to the changes they bring in their wake. Hence modernism tried to combat the fragmentation of the urban experience by bringing together aspects from different traditions in the hope of lending some coherence, however ironic, to the modern condition.

  Setting Georgian poetry within the context of its time not only helps illuminate the relationship between criticism and historical developments, it also throws some light on why Georgian poetry, although anachronistic, continued to be published throughout the period and under discussion in a number of newspapers and magazines, most notably J. C. Squire’s London Mercury .15 Clearly, Georgian poetry served some purpose, the key to which may lie in what Reeves calls its ‘naturalness of utterance’.16 This, together with its apparent distrust of rhetoric and grandiose themes, suggests a connection between Georgian poetry and ideological experience, for what characterizes the latter is the very sort of ‘simplicity’ and ‘spontaneity’ which characterized Georgian verse.

  Ideology has many functions, but perhaps the most important is to produce a subjectivity which is able to reconcile the contradictions of lived experience and so ensure the continuity of the bourgeois state.17 Significantly, the shift from an individualist to a collectivist state meant that the nature of subjectivity and its production were thrown into crisis. Georgian poetry can perhaps be seen as renewing through verse

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  eBook - ePub

  Georgian Poetry 1911-22

  • Timothy Rogers(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In reviewing on this page, a few weeks ago, the ‘Oxford Book of Victorian Verse’, we suggested that the later pages of that volume gave evidence of a remarkable poetic revival, though of one in no sense, moral or temporal, to be called Victorian. The quaintly-named anthology before us gives us the opportunity of taking up the subject again and carrying it a little further. It is boldly decreed that we may already speak of a new ‘Georgian’ period; and we accept the licence with alacrity. The word was wanted, and it sufficiently meets our need. The editor of the volume does not use it himself with undue strictness; for, though his chosen poems have all been published within the last two years, not a few of them come from writers whose work was known and valued at a remoter period. These are included, says the editor, ‘because within the chosen period their work seemed to have gained some accession of power ‘. The implication evidently is that for a poet to extend the limit of his power more than two years after he has begun to publish his poems is an exceptional occurrence. For our part we venture to hope that it happens more often than the editor would seem to suggest. A good many of our poets, we would fain believe, even of those who can remember the death of Queen Victoria, are still capable of developing and enriching their elderly strains. But Georgian, if we may apply the word (with a slightly different laxity) to poets whose work is characteristic of the twentieth rather than of the nineteenth century, conveniently summarizes the revival we wish to examine. Elizabethan literature, as we all know, was freely produced in the reign of James I., so it is no objection that most Georgian poetry has hitherto been written in the reign of Edward VII.

  There is a general difficulty in describing and defining any sort of literary movement in this country. It is that we have no continuous orthodoxy, no central academic tradition, to give us an immediate standard of comparison. A literary movement defines itself with the definition of the yoke which it refuses: but if there is no yoke, and nothing to rebel against, this simple method is denied us. It may be pleasing to an English poet to reflect how free he is born, but his condition deprives him of the pleasures of defiance. A semblance of them he may attain, or he could at one time, by agitating the delicacy of the public. This, however, is at best an illusory excitement. A poet defies the public from the very start, by the mere act of writing poetry. No agreement, in terms relevant to the poet's case, is really discussable between them; there is no imaginable round-table where they could meet to confer. The only body with which an excited poet can join direct issue is a constituted literary authority, in possession of the ground which he claims. Perhaps the post-Georgians may be granted the privilege of such an encounter. We have already an Academy, and the day may come when these poets exercise a tyranny under which they will never themselves have had the advantage of languishing. It will be no bad thing if they do so. The value of authority may be denied on other accounts, but it is unquestionable for those who attack it. It is so, not only because it compels all insurgents to produce a clear theory of their aims and objects, but also because it makes them concentrate all their forces and use them with the greatest possible vigour and wariness. The only poetic authority of any sort which has been seen in England for nearly a hundred years - at least since the final triumph of romanticism destroyed the last orthodoxy - has been (as we suggested before) the extraordinary personal domination of Tennyson. It is true that that had no very wholesome effect on poetry, including Tennyson's: but then his authority, precisely, was not that of an Academy. It was the authority of one intensely picturesque and majestic personality - an authority, moreover, elected, for all kinds of genial but irrelevant reasons, by popular acclaim. That was a fine and remarkable loyalty in its way; but we do not want a body of Academicians reverenced by the public for their great age and their flashing eyes. We want an Academy vaguely respected by the public as an official institution, and fiercely attacked by every poet (until he becomes a member of it) as an obstruction to all light and liberty. Then indeed we shall feel that poetry has every chance in its favour.

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