THE GEORGIANS

Although it may designate any writers active during the reign of George V (1910–36), the term ‘Georgian’ is usually ascribed one of two particular meanings. It refers either to the new generation of writers identified by Virginia Woolf in her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1923), namely E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, or the writers associated with the five popular Georgian Poetry anthologies edited by Edward Marsh and published from 1911 to 1922 by the Poetry Bookshop in London. These include Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, W. W. Gibson, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, John Masefield, Walter de la Mare, J. C. Squire, W. H. Davies and Harold Monro, as well as D. H. Lawrence and Robert Graves.

Woolf's essay was a response to Arnold Bennett's accusation that the new generation of Georgian novelists could not create real and convincing characters. Woolf argued that it was in fact the preceding EDWARDIAN generation of Bennett, H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy that lost sight of character in its pursuit of social reform and the description of outward detail. Georgian novelists had to abandon these outworn conventions, Woolf proclaimed, and though she chided Forster's and Lawrence's early work for preserving Edwardian methods and expressed doubts about the indecency of Joyce, the obscurity of Eliot and the limited scope of Strachey, she nevertheless endorsed their destruction of old usages and their search for new ways of telling the truth about character.

If Woolf's definition appropriated the term ‘Georgian’ for a set of recognisably modernist writers and techniques, the second definition has come to be associated with modernism's opposite: the supposedly timid and traditional late romantic rural verse of the Georgian Poetry anthologies. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and John Middleton Murry, among others, in trying to clear the ground for their own kind of poetry, skewered the perceived failings of this school, and constructed in their reviews a stereotype of the Georgians as country trippers writing ‘weekend pastorals’ or sub-Wordsworthian false rustics specialising in charmingly glib lyrics. In actual fact, Georgian poetry started out as a revolt against stilted Victorian rhetoric and moralising, and the outworn conventions of AESTHETICIST and imperialist verse; it was to be a new and revivifying poetry of REALISM, composed in the common speech.