Book Description

Though historical rather than critical in purpose, Mr. Ross’s book may well serve as a useful introduction to the modern period in English literature. The author places the Georgians in the perspective of their time, reconstructs some of the conditions under which the Georgian anthology was born, describes and defines the Georgian poetic temper, charts the changes which occurred in the poetry of the 1910–1922 period, and accounts for the downfall of the Georgian poetic ideal. Certainly not as disingenuous as the critics of the late twenties and the early thirties inferred, Georgian poetry itself was a re­action to the lifeless verse of the turn of the century. The move­ment attracted to it such writers as Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, and John Masefield, and it notably exemplified the very early brave new spirit of modernity before, during, and after the first World War. Mr. Ross’s meticulous and readable scholarship makes use of, for the first time, the some four hundred unpublished letters written to Edward Marsh by the contributors to the anthology. Though of course ancillary to the broad field of modern English literature, The Georgian Revolt has a good deal of the entirely new and, to many readers, rather startling information in it about the period.