2 - Edward Thomas in ecstasy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2009
Summary
The list of poets who might have been published in Georgian Poetry crosses some interesting boundaries of literary history. A. E. Housman refused as he felt himself too old; Ezra Pound was asked but since Georgian Poetry wanted only recent work and Pound was reluctant to excerpt anything from his forthcoming Ripostes, he was left out. As Georgian Poetry gained more of a reputation, its admissions became more selective, and so despite the enthusiasm of their Georgian backers, Robert Frost was considered too American, Charlotte Mew too unusual, and Edward Thomas too posthumous. But the fact that Thomas, of all people, never appeared in Georgian Poetry might not be the flagrant injustice it seemed at the time to his supporters, for his opinion of it was, at best, ambiguous. On the one hand, Leavis was wrong to think that ‘only a very superficial classification could associate Edward Thomas … with the Georgians at all’, since many of them were his friends and companions. Always close (or as close as the prickly Thomas ever got) to de la Mare, he also spent holidays with the Gibsons and Abercrombies, had Rupert Brooke to stay, and had actually shared a writing cottage with W. H. Davies, whose work he promoted generously. He had faintly hoped to be in the second Georgian volume himself, and when his reviews summarised the Georgian ethos as the ‘modern love of the simple and primitive, as seen in children, peasants, savages, early men, animals, and Nature in general’, the gentle mockery is being turned on his own prose work too.
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- British Poetry in the Age of Modernism , pp. 64 - 107Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005