The Columbia History of British Poetry (136 page)

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Page 540
While some poets who published in
Georgian Poetry
, like Lawrence and Robert Graves, remained influential and became associated with the Modernists, the Georgian movement could be declared "dead" (as it later was, by Laura Riding and Graves) for producing many poems that were too derivative and conventional to be memorable; the Romantic qualities could be easily mocked, as one wag did by asking,
Have you even been on a walking tour?
Do you make friends easily with dogs, poultry etc.?
Are you easily exalted by natural objects?
For Eliot and the Modernists, it was the Anglo-American movement of Imagism, rather than the Georgian movement, that afforded a stylistic transition away from the effusive late Victorians. English Imagists like T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, Ford Madox Ford, and Richard Aldington, along with their expatriate American colleagues, Amy Lowell, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Pound, and Eliot, were fostering a movement contemporary with the Georgians but asserting classical restraint, clarity, and simplicityusually in spare lyric poems and haiku that avoided ideas and narrative while expressing "momentary phases in the poet's mind" (according to Hulme) or "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" (Pound). Along with vigorous debate of their movement in essays published in the "little magazines" of the mid-teens, anthologies entitled
Some Imagist Poets
were published in 1915, 1916, and 1917. Ironically, then, while it was the so-called bloodless Georgians who engaged poeticallyand personallyin the "bloody'' tragedy of the time, the Imagists stylistically evaded issues of death and suffering, offering instead their superficial glances at the surfaces of things; Pound published his influential example of Imagism, "In a Station at the Metro""The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough"in 1916, as the tragic Somme offensive unfolded.
Nevertheless, in essays published just after the First World War, Eliot, in the wake of Imagism and in an effort to make way for his own, Modernist style of verse, tried to buryand did quite effectively smother for a whilethe Georgian movement with its early nineteenth-century English roots: "England puts her Greater Writers away securely in a Safe Deposit Vault, and curls to sleep like Father. There they go rotten; . . . Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth (poets of assured though modest merit) . . . punish us from their grave with the annual
 
Page 541
scourge of the Georgian Anthology." Pound and Wyndham Lewis declared emphatically that democracy had brought decay of language. Eliot wanted to replace the Romanticsand especially Wordsworth ("To remain with Wordsworth is equivalent to ignoring the whole of science subsequent to Erasmus Darwin")with the Metaphysical Poets and the French
symbolistes
, as a source and model for poetry. He directly attacked Wordsworth's definitions of poetry and poetic diction (in the "Preface'' to
Lyrical Ballads
): "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Against Wordsworth's emphasis on clear and natural poetry, Eliot asserted the syntactical complexity and "artificiality" of his own style of poetry: "Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be
difficult
. . . . The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. . . . " Eliot prescribed "town" poetry for a cosmopolitan elite in place of the accessible, familiar "country" poetry of the popular "Georgians."
In his campaign against the established Georgians and their anthologies Eliot even praised the first volume of
Wheels
, edited by Edith Sitwell in 1916. Eliot called it "a more serious book" than the current volume of Marsh's
Georgian Poetry
, one that, like his own work, looked outside the English canonto classical and European poetry, especially the French, for its sources: "Instead of rainbows, cuckoos, daffodils, and timid hares, they give us garden-gods, guitars and mandolins . . . they have extracted the juice from Verlaine and Laforgue." However, Eliot damned the Georgians with faint praise for the poets in
Wheels
, saying that "the book as a whole has a dilettante effect" and adding, in another review, "The poets who consider themselves most opposed to Georgianism, and who know a little French, are mostly such as could imagine the Last Judgement only as a lavish display of Bengal lights, Roman candles, catherine-wheels, and inflammable fire-balloons."
Certainly poetic extravagance and personal flamboyance identify the work of Sitwell, who, along with her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, published six volumes of
Wheels
between 1916 and 1921. In 1923, when she and Osbert introduced the poems in the volume
Facade
with a public performance in London, the two spoke through megaphones from behind masks on a curtain, accompanied by music composed by William Walton. One of the poems from
Façade
, "Hornpipe," begins,
 
Page 542
Sailors come
To the drum
Out of Babylon;
   Hobby-horses
Foam, the dumb
Sky rhinoceros-glum
Such a style of free associations, mixed metaphors, and metrical experimentsrather than meditation and thoughtmark Sitwell's work; Judgement Day is evoked in "The Shadow of Cain" through passages like this:
There were great emerald thunders in the air
In the violent Spring, the thunders of the sap and the blood in the heart
The Spiritual Light, the physical Revelation.
In the streets of the City of Cain there were great Rainbows
Of emeralds: the young people, crossing and meeting.
Focusing on Sitwell's effort to shake up the established Georgians, Eliot may have associated her work with that of the Modernists, but in introducing her
Collected Poems
(1957), Sitwell traces her wit and rebellion against literary custom to sources well within the English canonto the energetic satire of poets like Christopher Smart and Blake. Moreover, when she proclaims her poems to be "hymns of praise to the glory of life," she is certainly fulfilling the ambition of a Romantic rather than a Modernist. Nevertheless, like most avant-garde art that startles the expectations of the audience, Sitwell's work continues to be considered evocative rather than significant.
Hardy responds to harsh criticism like Eliot'sand Lawrence'sby defending his tradition, and implicitly, that of the Georgians, in an ironically entitled "Apology" for his
Collected Poems
(1922). He invokes the precedent of Wordsworth's "Preface" (itself an answer to critics) to speculate on causes for "the precarious prospects of English verse at the present day": "Whether owing to the barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, 'a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation' (to quote Wordsworth again), or from any other cause, we seem threatened with a new Dark Age.'' Hardy sums up this cultural malaise as the rise of a new form of superstition in sharp contrast to his

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