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Georgian poets and War poets<-poetry<-chapter 8<-contents<-position

2. Georgian Poets and War Poets
     From 1912 to 1922, five anthologies of English verse entitled Georgian Poetry were edited by Sir Edward Marsh and were issued from the Poetry Bookshop in London. Georgian Poets referred to all together about 39 poets who published their poems in the five anthologies during the reign of King George V. In poetic creation, influenced by Hardy and Housman, they advocate to tradition in form but development in content. Their aim was to protect English poetry from the uprising forces of modern civilization, and, as Edward Marsh said, “to make poetry readable once more”. And many Georgian Poets turned to the countryside for materials. The representatives included Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), W. H. Davies (1871-1940) and Edmund Blunden (1896-1974).
     Walter de la Mare was a voluminous writer of poetry, fiction and even of drama. On account of his romantic tendency in poetry, he belonged rather to the ninetieth century than to the twentieth century and thus was sometimes called “the belated last poet of the romantic tradition”. In his poems, magic and mystery created an atmosphere much resembled to that of Coleridge and Keats. Among his poems, the best known are “The Listeners” and “All That’s Past”.
      Georgian Poets belonged to the minor poets of that time, but some of them did produce memorable lines for the twentieth century English poetry.
    The First World War broke out in 1914, which lasted for four years and fundamentally weakened the British Empire. A few young men formed a group of “War Poets” and wrote poems either of old-fashioned patriotism or strong opposition to the war.
     Among War Poets, Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) reflected the optimism of the pre-war era. He studied English literature and joined the Fabian Society at Cambridge. In August 1914, he died of blood poisoning. Nowadays, he was mainly remembered for his patriotism and his five war sonnets, in which the most famous one were “The Soldier”. It begins with the following familiar lines:

                If I should die, think only this of me,
                That there’s some corner of a foreign field
                That is forever England.

     The pessimism rising with the continuance of the war was represented by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) and Siegried Sassoon (1886-1967).
     Owen is probably the best known of the War Poets. Although also killed in the war a week before the Armistice, he lived long enough to realize the cruel essence of the war and showed great sympathy for the common soldier in his poems. In his most pathetic war poem, “Strange Meeting”, which was set partly in the battle and partly in the hell. The nearly dead soldier encountered his dying enemy.

          I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
                                    I knew you in this dark, for so you frowned
                                   Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed,
                                    I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
                                    Let us sleep now…

     The only survivor among War Poets was Siegried Sassoon, who became a naïve patriot but turned to an anti-war poet later. It was he who collected and published the poems of Owen and another war poet, Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918). Before the war ended, Sassoon published the first volume of anti-war poems, Counterattack (1918), describing truly the horrors of war at the front and reflecting the soldiers’ intense desire for the war to stop. Although having touched many themes, Sassoon’s fame remains in his war poetry.

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