Georgian Poetry and James Elroy Flecker

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. Georgians are the poets who wrote the preludes and swan songs before the Great War of 1914-18, and some of them are also known as war poets, whose later verses were altered under the impact of that war.

Georgian poetry from before the war is typified as dreamy, romantic, and escapist compared to the harshness of war described by the royalists. The most enduring Georgian is Flecker, who introduced Orientalism in his verses and died young, although the most famous is probably Rupert Brooke, who outlived Flecker by three months and died patriotically on St. George’s Day, which is also his birthday. of Shakespeare. Forgotten Georgians are those who continued along the lines of the picturesque descriptions of the field of late romanticism.

The main 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, JC Squire and Edward Thomas.

An absent name is John Masefield, who wrote 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 a Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967.

James Elroy Flecker was almost exactly a contemporary of Rupert Brooke. They both died in 1915: Brooke on a transport ship bound for the Dardanelles and Flecker in a Swiss sanitarium. Both fantasized about death, Flecker more because he was diagnosed with consumption in 1910. The following quote is taken from Flecker’s Golden Voyage to Samarkand and reappeared posthumously in his verse work 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 deceive your pilgrimage

And I swear that Beauty lives even if the lilies die,

We poets of the proud ancient line

Who sing to find their hearts, we don’t know why,

What will we tell you? stories, wonderful stories

Of ships and stars and islands where good men rest,

Where the sunset rose never pales again,

And the winds and shadows fall to the West.

And how are you fooling yourself? Death has no rest

Warmer and deeper than the sand of the East

That hides the beauty and the brilliant faith of those

Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

(The Golden Journey to Samarkand)

This golden journey, as Ezra Pound pointed out, was carried out simply on paper, but Flecker still enjoys a popularity that other Georgians have lost or missed. Looking at his brief life and works in more detail:

Flecker’s father was a clergyman and principal at 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. When World War I broke out, he was not exactly 30 years old and unfit for military service. He died five months later in a sanatorium. His grave in Cheltenham, England, bears the epitaph “Oh Lord, restore his kingdom to the dreamer.”

Flecker’s verse has a lot of sensitivity and often little meaning. The Dying Patriot resembles Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier in that it urges the living to pick up where the dead left off, but lacks the curious English that Brooke insists on.

There is a house that the British entered, long ago,

Where now the springs of the ocean fall and flow,

And the dead dressed in red and sea lilies on their heads

Sway when prolonged winds blow.

Do not sleep, my country: although the night is here, far away

Your morning children cry out for war:

Fire in the night, oh dreams!

Even though she sent you like she sent you long ago

To the south to the desert, to the east to the ocean, to the north to the snow,

West of these sailors colder than the Hebrides I must go

Where the fleet of stars is anchored and the young star captains shine.

(The dying patriot)

What are these dead dressed in red if not the noble ancestors who have undergone a radical change? The verse is like a trance and lullaby, a mixture of amniotic fluid and the tranquility of amnesia. Those (patriots) who have gone before and the country itself requires that the young (children of the morning) 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 as a sign of heroism, to glow warmly forever in the cold night sky. The soul heads west along the path of the dead. ‘Hebrides’ sounds a bit strange, as if the Hesperides don’t quite fit together, and geographical objections about the cardinal points have no place in poetry, but it is not strange when the word ‘British’ is considered. This is good native stuff superimposed on Greek myth. It is the poetry of 1914 and “finished for Christmas” and encouraged the August Oxbridge volunteers for whom the war was but a distant prospect and an emotion and a blaze of glory like firefly.

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