THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

And I have something to expiate;
A pettiness.
It would be wrong to confuse a cultivated simplicity with the merely petty in the work of two of Lawrence’s most
enduringly popular ‘Georgian’ contemporaries. Nevertheless, by comparison with the challenge of Lawrence’s
exhilarating energy much of even the best verse of John Masefield (1878-1967) and Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)
seems merely unaffectedly dextrous. Despite the prominence of his work in the volumes of Georgian Poetry, a good
deal of de la Mare’s poetry, notably the volumes entitled Peacock Pie (1913), Tom Tiddler’s Ground (1932), and This
Year: Next Year (1937), was written specifically for children. His appealingly direct and fluent songlike manner still
provides young readers with an ideally unpretentious introduction to the virtues of rhyme and rhythm. The best of
Masefield’s verse is haunted by the variety, wildness, and desolation of the sea; it is also occasionally marked by the
inflections and peculiarities of sea-language. Two lyrics which first appeared
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in his volumes of 1902 and 1910, ‘Sea Fever’ (‘I must go down to the sea again ...’) and ‘Cargoes’ (‘Quinquireme of
Nineveh from distant Ophir ...’), remain amongst the most commonly cited and anthologized poems of the century.
Neither Masefield’s longer narrative poems, such as The Everlasting Mercy (1910) and the anti-blood sport Reynard
the Fox (1919), nor the many bland lyrics which proclaim the virtues of the open road have the easy swing and the
elegance of the early work. Masefield’s Collected Poems of 1923, however, proved hugely popular with readers. It
reached its twelfth edition in 1930, the year in which he was appointed Poet Laureate in succession to the equally
unadventurous Robert Bridges (1844-1930).
It was largely through what have since become known as the ‘little magazines’ that the Modernist revolution in
poetry was announced, carried forward, and propagated. It is by the very success of that revolution that we now
inevitably judge the poetic achievement of the 1920s and 1930s. An educated audience, impatient with inherited
conventions, was ready for change. If the audience was relatively small, ‘advanced’ in its opinions and predominantly
young, its enthusiasms and perceptions steadily established new critical norms which came to be applied far beyond
the predilections of a coterie. The appearance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the first issue of the quarterly
magazine The Criterion (circulation 600) in October 1922 struck many as forcefully expressing the disordered and
irregular nature of the modern condition in a language that was indisputably ‘modern’. When the poem was published
separately, initially in issues of one thousand, it gained in esteem and notoriety. In their Preface to the undergraduate
volume of Oxford Poetry 1926, for example, Charles Plumb and W. H. Auden boldly pronounced that ‘if it is a
natural preference to inhabit a room with casements opening upon Fairyland, one at least of them should open upon
the Waste Land’. In the same year Evelyn Waugh purchased Eliot’s Poems, 1909-1925 in Oxford and found them
‘marvellously good but very hard to understand’, adding that there was ‘a most impressive flavour of the major
prophets about them’. This was not an opinion shared by Waugh’s father, the critic and publisher Arthur Waugh.
Eliot’s poetry, he held, offered a salutary example which reflected that of the ancients: ‘It was a classic custom in the
family hall, when a feast was at its height, to display a drunken slave amongst the sons of the household, to the end
that they, being ashamed at the ignominious folly of his gesticulations, might determine never to be tempted into such
a pitiable condition themselves.’
Arthur Waugh’s outrage was not confined to Eliot. According to his son he had earlier been equally shocked by
the 1916 anthology of Some Imagist Poets. The existence of the Imagists (or, as he first put it, the ‘Imagistes’) had
been announced in a London tea-shop in 1912 to two startled fellow-poets by Ezra Pound. Pound (1885-1972) had
arrived in London from the United States in April 1909 and he made the metropolis the centre of his energizing
activities for the following eleven years. They were years of crucial importance to the future of English, and to some
extent American, poetry. Pound was as discerning as
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he was arrogant, as stimulating to fellow-writers as he was discriminating about their work, though he later seemed to
the equally restless radical Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) merely a ‘fire-eating propagandist’ whose utterances
‘were not accompanied by any very experimental efforts in his particular medium’. Lewis, the co-editor of Blast, the
Review of the Great English Vortex (1914-15), scarcely rendered Pound proper justice after the collapse of their cooperative
relationship. Their concerns had also veered apart, those of Lewis towards painting and prose, those of
Pound towards a highly complex referential poetry (a poetry that Lewis improperly saw as looking backwards rather
than forwards to ‘the new burst of art in progress’). The two numbers of Blast had ambitiously attempted to forge
together the interests and advances of writers, theorizers, and artists but its ultimate achievement is more strictly
visual and typographical than ‘literary’. It made loud but often empty revolutionary noises about there being no