The Columbia History of British Poetry (133 page)

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Nelson, James G.
Sir William Watson
. New York: Twayne, 1966.
Smith, M. Van Wyk.
Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War, 18991902
. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.
Temple, Ruth Z.
The Critic's Alchemy: A Study of the Introduction of French Symbolism into England
. New York: Twayne, 1953.
 
Page 532
18981945: Hardy to Auden
George H. Gilpin
"My mother had a Tennyson; her present parallel would not possess Eliot or Auden."
Sir Frederic J. Osborn
The canon of English poetry since the Renaissance, as established by the High Victorian Francis Palgrave in his selections for
The Golden Treasury
(1861), had "a certain unity"; he divided his anthology "Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language" into "Books of Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, and Wordsworth." If Palgrave had continued his canon into his own time, he would most certainly have added a "Book of Tennyson"the friend to whom his collection was dedicated. Palgrave's mid-nineteenth-century assumptions remained explicitly turn-of-the-century Romantictradition defined as ''natural growth," and canon understood on the basis of Shelley's Neoplatonic ideal of "that great Poem which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have build up since the beginning of the world.'" A hundred years laterby the time Palgrave's nineteenth-century selection had been supplemented by Philip Larkins's twentieth-century one in
The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse
(1973)another book had been added to the English canon that could be called the "Book of Hardy."
For the generation of poets like Larkin who came of age after World War II, it was Thomas Hardy, and not W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, or Ezra Pound, who seemed centralagainto the English canon. Between the world wars, the figures of the international Modernist movement, particularly Eliot through his essays, aggressively attempted to displace Hardy and the English tradition from the literary mainstream (a dis-
 
Page 533
placement that still continues in the anthologies presented to students by scholars with a Modernist bias), but Larkin, who declared Hardy's
Collected Poems
"the best body of poetic work this century has to show," allotted the most poems in his Oxford anthology to Hardy and acknowledged how the model for his own poetry had shifted to him from Yeats: "Hardy taught me to feel rather than to writeof course one has to use one's own language and one's own jargon and one's own situations and he taught one as well to have confidence in what one felt." Donald Davie, speaking for the poets of this postwar generationseen by the mid-1950s to be "the Movement"thought that "in British poetry of the last fifty years (as not in American) the most far-reaching influence, for good or ill, has not been Yeats, still less Eliot and Pound, not Lawrence, but
Hardy
."
The revival of Hardy's reputation by Larkin and "the Movement" was a reaffirmation of a tradition of interrelated insular and Romantic attitudes quintessentially
English
: observation over participation, self-absorption over reaching out, withdrawal over involvement, nature over art, simplicity over complexity, the old-fashioned over the modern, naïveté over sophisticationmost of all, the personal voice of a Wordsworth over the impersonal one of an Eliot. During the first two decades of the century these qualities continued to be expressed in work by a group of poets known as the "Georgians," whose models came from Palgrave's English canon; these poets regularly published in popular anthologies entitled
Georgian Poetry
and edited by Edward Marsh. D. H. Lawrence, reviewing the first volume of 19111912, found it to be a healthy antidote to the nightmare world of early Modernism: "This collection is like a big breath taken when we are waking up after a night of oppressive dreams. The nihilists, the intellectual, hopeless peopleIbsen, Flaubert, Hardyrepresent the dreams we are waking from. It was a dream of demolition."
To include Hardy among the founders of the movement of intellectual pessimism that stirred in Europe at the turn of the century and continued between the world wars is to acknowledge the disturbing, dark anxiety about the state of civilization that underlies and shapes the best poetry of the twentieth century, both traditional and Modernist. Indeed, expression of a sense of crisis in modern history had begun with Wordsworth's "Preface" to
Lyrical Ballads
(1800). Fearing that his own violent Age of Revolution, in which "the multitude of causes, unknown
 
Page 534
in former times . . . now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind," might overwhelm poetic creativity, he argued for stylistic clarity, for "a selection of language really used by men," and for the retention of rhyme and meter as a kind of formal frame "in tempering the painful feeling which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions." While in the twentieth century the Moderns expressed this anxiety about the state of civilization in a style that became increasingly difficult and obscure, the poets of the English tradition coped with and consciously expressed the same anxiety by retaining Romantic strategies.
Because of the propaganda of the Modernists, the Georgians constitute a lost generation in the history of twentieth-century English poetry. Yet, along with Hardy, the Georgians liberated English poetry from the stultifying conventions of flowery, archaic diction and constant moralizing of the late Victorians; as post-Darwinians, they could engage poetically with the bloody violence and fateful brutality of nature. Edmund Gosse, in reviewing Marsh's 19111912 collection of Georgian poetry, acknowledged this engagement by finding that these poets "exchange the romantic, the sentimental, the fictive conception of literature, for an ingenuousness, sometimes a violence, almost a rawness in the approach to life itself." Hence, the poetic world of W. H. Davies has the pessimism of Blake's
Songs of Experience
in which the imagery of innocence becomes twisted by predatory violence. In "The Villain" description of a delightful pastoral evening closes with this disturbing image:
I turned my head and saw the wind
    Not far from where I stood,
Dragging the corn by her golden hair,
    Into a dark and lonely wood.
The emaciated corpse of a four month old baby haunts the coroner at "The Inquest" with the refrain,
                  And I could see that child's one eye
    Which seemed to laugh, and say with glee:
'What caused my death you'll never know
    Perhaps my mother murdered me';
and from the point of view of "The Rat" an old woman, abandoned at home while her husband drinks, her daughter flirts, and her son taunts a lame cobbler, is a victim ready for sacrifice:

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