If a date is to be fixed for this change, the year 1911, I think, will do as well or better than any other. It saw the publication of Mr Masefield's 'Everlasting Mercy' and of Brooke's first volume, and these-not, for the moment, to consider their merits-caused a quite surprising amount of serious discussion. In the next year came the first issue of Mr Marsh's Georgian Poetry,' published by Mr Harold Monro at the Poetry Bookshopitself another sign of the times. Mr Marsh claimed that English poetry had recently taken on a new power, and in this faith he compiled his anthology which was a greater success than its promoters had expected.

To trace any particular movement in poetry to its ultimate sources in the life of the people is hard and doubtful enough when history has put all before the critic and he is far enough removed in time to see events in some sort of pattern. I shall not attempt to relate this movement to the undoubted intellectual and emotional quickenings of the years before the war otherwise than by saying that it was clearly one of them. There are, however, two poets of the interregnum,' not fully recognised before this time, who are often credited with having influenced the Georgian poets.

And yet I doubt whether Mr Thomas Hardy or Mr A. E. Housman exercised more than a superficial or incidental influence in those early days. They were, rather, premature Georgians themselves, like guns secretly established and waiting for the course of events to unmask them. Certainly until this time their importance was not properly realised. Mr Hardy was obstinately supposed to be a veteran novelist, who had turned poet, as a man might take up a retiring post, and who deserved to be indulged in this relaxation of his later years. Mr Housman's Shropshire Lad' existed in such isolation and was surrounded by circumstances so peculiar that it was almost impossible to look on it as a significant part of the main stream of English poetry. But both Mr Hardy and Mr Housman, in their different ways, turned from the exhausted and etiolated Tennysonian manner and from that Swinburnian manner which was so fatally easy for any imitator to acquire and so impossible for any imitator to put to the smallest living use. Poetry goes down the hill when poets

mechanically look at things as their predecessors have looked at them. The change that occurs when they rub their eyes and look for themselves is generally slight, or appears slight, when criticism attempts to describe it. But it implies a return to reality and the novelty, whatever it may be, is priceless. Mr Hardy and Mr Housman achieved this return, and each contributed a new method of using language, Mr Hardy compelling words to evoke such emotions as he chose, and Mr Housman expressing lyrical feeling in a simple, epigrammatic, almost lapidary style.

Neither, however, has at any time been considered a revolutionary, and yet this epithet, odd as it may now seem to recall it, was freely applied to the Georgians of 1912, who attempted the same return with less success. The most prominent and characteristic of them were Brooke, Mr Masefield, Mr W. W. Gibson, and Mr Lascelles Abercrombie. The first two were accused of wantonly introducing ugliness into poetry, which should be used only for the embodiment of beautiful images. Brooke referred with rather rhetorical gusto to the physical details of sea-sickness and to the more unpleasant physical signs of senile decay. Mr Masefield made his country brooks run over rusty pots and pans, and dealt in the violence of prize-fights and murder committed by a navvy on his mistress. Mr Gibson avowedly turned from his early, rather pallid decorations to the nobility of labour, the tragedy of poverty and views from slumwindows. Mr Abercrombie, besides some essays in Masefieldian violence of action, was violent in thought and language: his muse was decidedly muscular, and his prosody sometimes suggested the lumpy biceps of the Strong Man at a fair. All four seemed to be of Synge's opinion that, before anything else can be achieved, our poetry must learn again to be brutal.

All four, of course, sought the return to fact more consciously and with fewer resources than Mr Hardy and Mr Housman. It was a rebellion deliberately undertaken against the exhausted conventions of the preceding twenty years, only in a lesser degree, not a natural and instinctive new opening of the eyes, and much of the rebellious violence was a sign of struggle and restlessness rather than of settled inclination. It must be observed too

that the label 'Georgian,' though very happily chosen, had, to begin with, an exceedingly vague connotation. That first selection made by Mr Marsh included several writers who were afterwards acknowledged to be incongruous bedfellows. But besides these there were poets who belonged to their time but can hardly be forced into the description which roughly covers the four I have already named. There was James Elroy Flecker, who avowed Mr Housman as his master in style, but who, aiming at the creation of concrete beauty, really felt stronger affinities with the French Parnassians. Mr Harold Monro made odd excursions into a half-world of dreams merging into nightmare that had at moments a reality of its own. And there was the unassuming but very cunning naïveté of Mr W. H. Davies's small poems upon birds, bees, flowers, and children, which afterwards had a great deal to answer for. Also, there was Mr de la Mare, expressing, by symbols of magic and by magically subtle rhythms, a very human attitude towards life. In all of them, in their degrees, was the element of novelty, the new opening of the eyes. In these four whom I have just mentioned it was perhaps more natural, there was less conscious rebellion, than in the others. But no formula, however ingenious, can impose the unity of a school on the first Georgians who worked from different inspirations and in many cases were not personally known to one another.

Then came the war, and Brooke died in the French hospital-ship off Scyros, and Flecker in the sanitarium at Davos. These accidental happenings touched the imagination of a public which erroneously believed it to be characteristic of good poets to die young, and encouraged the growth of that new atmosphere of appreciation to which I have already referred. The emotions of war became a forcing-house for this very tender shoot of a poetic revival. It was inevitable that sentimentalism should rage, and the early war-poetry was of a predominantly sentimental character. Speculations have often been attempted as to the manner in which Brooke would have developed if he had lived. It is possible that his poems were only the youthful efflorescence of a genius not destined for poetry at all, that he would have excelled as a critic, perhaps as a novelist, even more

probably as a dramatist. What is as certain as anything can be is that if he had survived to accompany the Naval Division in its battles on the Somme in 1916 he would not have continued to write in the manner of the '1914' sonnets. These, fine as they are, are yet typical of all the work produced by the same crisis. A restless, dissatisfied, introspective generation, believing little in the possibility of war, and not at all that war could ever touch it closely, was suddenly, among infinite clamours and paroxysms of mixed emotions, summoned to prepare itself for battle. It was impossible that the poets of this generation should not be over-conscious of their own position, of their own emotions. The attitude of patriotism or of self-sacrifice into which the moment threw them was, for the moment, the sole reality. They knew that they had chosen to fight: the concrete meaning of that choice was as yet only to be imagined. It was later, when some of them had seen real warfare in the trenches, that a more solid and more actual warpoetry began to be written.

The change wrought by experience may be seen if we contrast one of Brooke's sonnets with a sonnet written later by Mr Sassoon. Brooke, having made, like thousands of others, his heroic choice, can comprehend its meaning only in general terms. He cries:

'If I should die think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

'And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.'

It is a beautiful poem, it is sincerely passionate. For a contrast to it I have chosen not one of Mr Sassoon's vivid, sharply drawn scenes of trench-life but a sonnet

no less personal than this. He fought and suffered: he
suffered as much in the persons of the others as in his
own. He revolted against the war and in consequence
he was withdrawn from it. Then he wrote:

'I am banished from the patient men who fight.
They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,

They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light.
Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight
They went arrayed in honour. But they died,-
Not one by one; and mutinous I cried

To those who sent them out into the night.
The darkness tells how vainly I have striven

To free them from the pit where they must dwell,
In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven
By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.

Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;
And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.'

The difference, not merely in degree, but equally in
kind, of self-consciousness, is at once apparent. Brooke's
subject is the impact made on his mind by the imagined
possibility of death in certain circumstances. Mr Sassoon
is moved by something a great deal more definite. His
emotion is more urgent and more poignant, and the
experience contained in the poem is at once richer, more
complex, and more directly expressed. Of this nature
was the true war-poetry which began to be written
when warfare had become for many a fact of daily life.
It makes up most of the work of Wilfred Owen and
Mr Sassoon, some part of the work of Mr Robert Graves
and Mr Edmund Blunden. Of these, Mr Blunden, who
still retains a passionately remembering interest in his
experiences of war, seems the most likely to give us a
full picture of the life of those days. Removal in time
has not weakened his creative grasp of it, but more and
more enables him to disentangle its essential spirit from
passing accidents.

But it was not only in writing of war that the new poets developed. More sprang up behind the first line, four more times did collections of Georgian Poetry' appear, and presently all sorts of anthologies of contemporary verse were produced. Critics and public continued to supply at least an atmosphere of serious