Georgian Poetry and James Elroy Flecker
The Georgian Poets were named after the reign of King George V who was crowned in 1910. The first volume of Georgian Poetry appeared in 1912, proposed by Rupert Brooke. Four more volumes were published - the last in 1922 - edited by Sir Edward Marsh. The Georgians are the poets who wrote the preludes and swan songs to and before the Great War of 1914-18, and some of them are also known as War Poets whose later verse altered under the impact of that war.p
Pre-war Georgian poetry is typified as dreamy and romantic and escapist in comparison with the harshness of war described by the realists. The most enduring Georgian is Flecker who introduced orientalism into his verse and died young, though the most famous is, still, probably, Rupert Brooke who outlived Flecker by three months and died patriotically on St George’s Day, which is also Shakespeare’s birthday. The forgotten Georgians are those who continued in the vein of late-Romantic picturesque descriptions of countryside.
The major Georgians are Lascelles Abercrombie, Hilaire Belloc, Edmund Blunden, Ruert Brooke, William Henry Davies, Ralph Hodgson, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare, Harold Monro, Siegfried Sassoon, J.C. Squire, and Edward Thomas.
An absent name is John Masefield who was writing earlier and lived longer than most Georgians. He is best known for Salt-Water Ballads (1902) and for his narrative poem The Everlasting Mercy (1910). John Masefield was Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967.
James Elroy Flecker was almost exactly a contemporary of Rupert Brooke. Both died in 1915 - Brooke on a troopship bound for the Dardanelles and Flecker in a Swiss sanatorium. Both of them fantasised about death, Flecker more so because he was diagnosed with consumption in 1910. The following quotation is taken from Flecker’s Golden Journey to Samarkand and reappeared posthumously in his verse play Hassan (1922) for which Edward Elgar composed a score; and Elgar’s music could be as lush and seductive as the verse.
We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,-
What shall we tell you? tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall toward the West.
And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than that orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
(The Golden Journey to Samarkand)
This golden journey, as Ezra Pound remarked, took place merely on paper, yet Flecker still enjoys a popularity that other Georgians have lacked or lost. Looking at his brief life and works in more detail:
Flecker’s father was a clergyman and headmaster of Dean Close School, where Flecker was a day boy. He attended Trinity College Oxford and also Caius College Cambridge where he studied Arabic, Persian and Turkish before joining the diplomatic service. He served as Vice-Consul in Constantinople (Istanbul), Smyrna (Izmir), and Beirut from 1910 to 1913; however, his health was poor and he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. At the outbreak of the First World War he was not quite 30 years old and unfit for military service. He died five months later in a sanatorium. His grave in Cheltenham, England, bears the epitaph ‘O Lord, restore his realm to the dreamer.’
Flecker’s verse is high on sensibility and often low on sense. The Dying Patriot bears a resemblance to Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier in that it urges the living to carry on where the dead left off, but it lacks the curious Englishness on which Brooke is insistent.
There’s a house that Britons walked in, long ago,
Where now the springs of ocean fall and flow,
And the dead robed in red and sea-lilies overhead
Sway when the long winds blow.
Sleep not, my country: though night is here, afar
Your children of the morning are clamorous for war:
Fire in the night, O dreams!
Though she send you as she sent you, long ago,
South to the desert, east to ocean, north to snow,
West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides I must go
Where the fleet of stars is anchored, and the young star-captains glow.
(The Dying Patriot)
What are these dead robed in red but the noble ancestors who have suffered a sea change? The verse is trance-like and lulling - a mixture of amniotic fluid and the tranquillity of amnesia. Those (patriots) who have gone before and the country itself require the young (children of the morning) to go to the ends of the earth in Imperial service. Meanwhile, the dying patriot himself (why not herself) is about to become part of a constellation in mark of heroism, to glow warmly for evermore in the cold night sky. The soul is headed westwards on the path of the dead. ‘Hebrides’ sounds a little odd, as though Hesperides didn’t quite fit, and geographical quibbles over cardinal points have no place in poetry - but it’s not odd when the word ‘Britons’ is considered. This is good native stuff overlaid on Greek myth. It’s the poetry of 1914 and ‘over by Christmas’ and it cheered the Oxbridge volunteers of August for whom a war was but a distant prospect and excitement and a firefly blaze of glory.
Read the full version of this essay at:
www.literature-study-online.com/essays/war-poets.html
Stephen Colbourn has published many articles about literature on Literature-study-online at
www.literature-study-online.com. He is a freelance writer. He has written widely on English Language Teaching and has published articles on literature, linguistics, and computers in various journals together with many Readers for Heinemann and Macmillan Education. He has contributed articles on literature to The Essentials of Literature in English post-1914, published by Hodder Arnold in 2005.
Tags: English Literature, Georgians, James Elroy Flecker, Poetry, The Georgian Poets, The Golden Jour, War Poets
