It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain why one period rather than another should be rich in poetry. It is, for example, maintained that great verse generally coincides with some great national excitement, either of victory or defeat. Men sing, this view would maintain, best when they are most disturbed, and poetry, like trade, follows the battle-flag. This theory could eas ily be destroyed by instances both from England and France, and there is another theory which better explains the periods of fer tility that supervene, as did the Georgian, on a long period of barrenness. It may perhaps be stated that poetry goes in long cycles for two reasons. First because it is the most intensive form of art : it is a divine shorthand, and can summarize in a page what may require a volume in prose. Poetry therefore is liable quickly to absorb its material. In the second place, though mankind never wants much poetry, it always demands a little. Poetry is in a sense the ultimate luxury of the human mind : it is a luxury that no men want all the time, few men want much of the time, but that all men must have some time. So great a need and so vast a de sire do in the long run precipitate their object, and thus after silence song is born.
The Georgian period may have owed something to the stormy days in which it was generated. Imperialism had seen itself in the mirror of the Boer War and found that it looked uncom monly like a skeleton. Industrialism which for a century had been an affair of capital was with urgent creaks and groans be coming a problem of labour. Victorian comfort was changing into the lurid extravagance of Edwardianism. The oil-engine was challenging the printing-press for the control of the soul of man.
Here were conditions which called for examination, explana tion, defence and condemnation, and if the prose-writers—Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy and Shaw—were at work, how and why should the poets be still? They weren't. But poetry is a subtler thing than prose. It is less like a photograph than a picture, less like a picture than a face seen by a lightning flash and remem bered in a dream. Therefore it is not surprising that this grossly confused age should express itself supremely in a poet of sheer and airy music like Walter de la Mare, or in so consciously ex quisite a craftsman as Flecker. These two with Masefield, Davies and Brooke stand out as the leading names of the period.
It is not our business to range as much as to record. The world was in fact brought to the realization of the re-birth of poetry not by Brooke, nor by the first Georgian anthology, nor by the publication of Flecker's Bridge of Fire, nor even by the establish ment of the Poetry Bookshop in 1912. It was not to the marvel of The Listeners that the gates swung open, but to the huge ham mer-blows of The Everlasting Mercy published in the English Review. The effect of that poem was almost comparable to the excitement induced by the appearance of Don Juan. Poetry with Masefield had once again ceased to be a matter for poets and coteries : it had become the possession of the people.
By that one blow Masefield flung the door of public interest wide, and the rest of the waiting poets flooded through it with a shout. The period is so rich that in the first place there must
be a catalogue of names like the Homeric catalogue of the ships —Lascelles Abercrombie, Gordon Bottomley, Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, John Drinkwater, F. S. Flint, John Freeman, Ralph Hodgson, W. W. Gibson, Gerald Gould, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, Harold Monro, John Masefield, Thomas Goult, Charlotte Mew, Edward Shanks, Fredegond Shove, J. C. Squire, Anna Wickham, and of the Irish, W. B. Yeats, "A.E.," James Stephens, Padraic Colum, Francis Ledwidge, Seumas O'Sullivan and Dr. Douglas Hyde. And when it is recalled that all belong to the pre-War period, it is reasonable to suggest that Victorian ism was dead, that a new and fertile period had begun. It is dif ficult to classify material so various, or in respect of work so recent to identify the prevailing influence, particularly as these influences are still working themselves out. Certain of these poets, it was clear from the outset, whatever their individual mer its, would not be likely to found a school. Lascelles Abercrombie and Gordon Bottomley, for example, both engaged in revising the blank verse line and, if possible, in re-establishing the poetic drama, were necessarily monks of verse. With such preoccupa tions they would be bound to stand outside the main stream. Both added notably to the intensification of poetic language, and Bottomley in Gruach wrote a play in verse which in time will be recognized as a permanent part of British dramatic effort. But they were not likely to impinge on the work of their fellows. D. H. Lawrence, if a poet at all, was one so savagely individual, so arrogantly physical, that he must have abashed even his ad mirers. He reached the extreme of remorseless resignation to the senses. He might be endured : he could not be copied. Charlotte Mew, Fredegond Shove and Anna Wickham of the women all had their own self-centred emotions. In each case their output was limited to the attar of their spiritual nature. No other poets of their period reached such continuous intensity of expression, but its very merit made it fatiguing. They are all three poets whose poems should be lived with like a great picture rather than caught suddenly like the colour of a flower. Finally, of those not likely to fit into a scheme or to herald a new world those two dis tinguished poets Gerald Gould and Ralph Hodgson should be mentioned. Both were poets of discontent with their age. Gerald Gould carried into action what Ralph Hodgson immortally ex pressed in such a poem as "The Gipsy Girl." But each had his own secret. Gould was on a pilgrimage: he was not sure whither, nor could he guide others. But he must seek. Ralph Hodgson of all his age saw loveliness most directly and strongly. He recorded it, and was struck dumb by the very completeness of his utterance. These were then all poets who belonged to no school. But of the rest it might have been expected that de la Mare, Flecker or Masefield might each have set a fashion, though in fact it was Brooke who with Drinkwater and Harold Monro created that general attitude to which Freeman, Squire, Shanks and later Martin Armstrong, F. W. Harvey and Edmund Blunden attached themselves—the attitude to which the generic term "Georgian" has tended to be specifically applied. Of these in time Squire assumed the leadership, and he will be entitled to special memory if not as the founder at least as the saviour of a school of poetry. De la Mare founded no school, though his rhythms have effected a profound revolution in the structure of English verse. No poet writing for the next 5o years will or can be unaffected by those fairy declensions, those elfin ascents. De la Mare need not fear mortality. His accent is now a part of English verse. He will continue to have imitators of his manner, but he is too incorrigibly delicate in substance to prevail upon the mind of other poets. Flecker perhaps failed of influence because of his long illness and untimely death. A poet cannot found a correspondence school, and Flecker, except for the earliest years of his output—the Oxford and Cambridge years—was first an exile in the East, and then a dying man in a Swiss sanatorium. It is, even so, surprising that "The Old Ships" should drag no lesser ships in their shining wake, or that no later pilgrims should have set out on "The Golden Journey to Samarkand." Effects of the is a question whether Masefield might not have created a school, if his violence had not been outpointed by the War. Strength and beauty, ranging hand in hand, were an intoxicating sight for all men, but most of all for poets. And it might have been supposed at least that Masefield would restore the narrative poem to its proper place in English poetry. He has not, and it is more than likely that the War, which encouraged pastoral poetry, the verse of retreat from uproar, may have equally turned men's minds from poetry, like Masefield's, of con flict and tumult.