The Georgian Poetic

T. S. Eliot, in his 1961 address "To Criticize the Critic," admitted that his early critiques of Georgian poetry were partly motivated by a desire to defend the Modernist poetry he and his peers championed. This personal insight reflects a broader pattern where critics, advocating for successive waves of "new" poetry in the 1920s through 1940s, often targeted the Georgians as symbols of outdated literary styles. Figures like Day Lewis used dismissive caricatures of Georgian poets, such as calling them writers of "very low vitality," to promote revolutionary poetic movements, reducing the Georgians to mere counterexamples in Modernist polemics. Over time, distinctions between Edward Marsh’s original Georgian circle and John Squire’s Neo-Georgians blurred, and the widespread disdain for Georgian poetry became an unquestioned axiom. However, the 1950s brought a reassessment through biographies, editions, correspondence, and histories that highlighted the Georgians’ pivotal role in shaping twentieth-century English poetics. The scholarship of Christopher Hassall and Robert H. Ross corrected earlier misjudgments and provided a foundation for deeper understanding, which this book aims to expand by refining their findings and exploring overlooked aspects of the Georgian poetic legacy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.