Rural Revival And The Georgian Legacy

Sassoon's great friend and fellow veteran, Edmund Blunden, also gained early exposure through Georgian Poetry, but not until after the First World War. Much of Blunden's writing, poetry and prose, exhibits the Georgian nostalgia for a simpler past when the landscape helped forge a stronger and authentic sense of Englishness among individuals and their organic communities. Paul Fussell notes that for Blunden ‘the countryside is … as precious as English literature,’ invoking indirectly the comforting blend of verdant fields and books of Davies' ‘In May’. Blunden's aesthetic is rooted in the English pastoral tradition, inspirited by his Georgian contemporaries, Wordsworth, Edward Young and Izaac Walton, characterizing exact observation, conventional form and metre, and precise if archaic diction, balanced in uneasy tension with subject matter often shaped by his own traumatic experiences of modernity. Two of his widely anthologized poems from the 1920s demonstrate precisely this nostalgia and this tension. In six-line fixed rhyme stanzas, the speaker of ‘Forefathers’, from The Shepherd (1922), recounts a pre-industrialized rural community of shepherds and harvesters and huntsmen. These ‘men of pith and thew, / Whom the city never called’, are not exploited or impoverished. In this idyllic pastoral setting they watch their children play on greens, as their fathers watched them, ‘As my father once watched me.’ Having placed himself within the rural tradition he longs for, he excises himself from it.