More attractive if less economical is Parade’s End (1924–8), a quartet also known
as the Tietjens tetralogy, after its hero Christopher Tietjens, a Yorkshire squire rooted
in an old idea of England. At the war’s end, Tietjens leaves his treacherous wife Sylvia
for the suffragette schoolteacher Valentine Wannop. The inner volumes draw on
Ford’s own war experiences. Equally attractive are Ford’s fictionalized literary remi-
niscences,Return to Yesterday (1931) and It Was the Nightingale (1933), his travel
book Provence and his wonderful The March of Literature (1938). In all the later
books, the reader can hear Ford’s voice speaking. In a time of a cultural transition,
writing must regain a vital relation with the speech of the day, and such a shift had
begun before 1914. The last of Ford’s eighty books to appear (in 1988) was A History
ofOur Own Times, I (1875–95), written in 1930.nPoetr y
Pre-war verse
After 1900, the Romantic impulse became less rhetorical and its subjects became
simpler. Apart from Hardy and Yeats, great talents were few. Kipling’s ‘The Way
through the Woods’ is an example of a successfully nostalgic Edwardian poem:
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.John Masefield, W. H. Davies and Walter de la Mare were Edwardians who also
appeared in the first of Edward Marsh’s five anthologies ofGeorgian Poetry, which
came out between 1912 and 1922. Successful anthologies establish poetic tastes.
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861), embodying Tennyson’s taste, sold well for a
ce ntury; it was enlarged in 1896. Marsh preferred something more modest:
Abercrombie, Drinkwater, Gibson. Less dim names are Rupert Brooke, J. E. Flecker,
D. H. Lawrence, James Stephens, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg
and Harold Monro, whose Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire Street, London, offered
readings (and beds) to many poets.
Headline literary history sometimes pretends that ‘Georgian Poetry’ (hedgerows,
tweed and cider) was deservedly replaced by ‘War Poetry’ or by ‘Modernist Poetry’.
Yet war poets and modernist poets appeared in Georgian Poetry, and Ezra Pound in
The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1912).
A concise literary history deals with the better writers. It can nod only rarely to
those who lie offthe beaten track, writers such as Christopher Smart or G. M.
Hopkins. One such little-known writer of talent, published by Harold Monro, was
Charlotte Mew (1869–1928). Reading through the New Penguin Book of English Verse336 12 · ENDS AND BEGINNINGS: 1901–19