routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

374 The twentieth century: 1900–45
remembered for bringing the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins to a
wide public in 1918, but his own poetry reached a considerably greater
readership, notably with The Testament of Beauty in 1929.
Masefield’s subject was the sea, and in his prolific career he wrote
poems, novels such as Sard Harker (1924), stories and adventure yarns.
The well-known short poem Cargoes was published in Ballads and
Poems (1910), and his Collected Poems (1923, the year after the publication
of The Waste Land) was a bestseller. He continued to write prolifically
as Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967, the second longest
term in office as Laureate, exceeded only by Tennyson.
If Masefield was the poet of the open sea, W.H. Davies was the poet
of the open road. His The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908)
continues a tradition established with George Borrow’s Lavengro in
1851: picaresque pictures of life on the road – a style which Jack Kerouac
would later Americanise successfully. Davies’s poetry reached a wide
readership, affirming countryside and rural values with great success.
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep and cows.
(Leisure)
THIRTIES POETS
Consider this and in our time
As the hawk sees it or the helmetted airman
(W.H. Auden, Consider)
Most writers between the wars displayed an engagement with the
issues of the time. In essays, criticism, and journalism a wide range of
views are aired which might not find their way into novels or poetry.
In the 1930s, political commitment became a more noticeable part of
creative writing, especially in the poetry of Auden.
These lines, from the poem Consider by W.H. Auden, published in