Gibson’s verse, like Masefield’s, aims at directness through the thoughts
and attitudes of working-class life, using deliberately ordinary language
and jog-trot rhythms. ‘Hit’, above, comes from a volume which has a
good claim to be the first volume of blunt, prosaic, unillusioned war
poetry, and having survived the carnage at Loos a month earlier, Robert
Graves wrote to Marsh from the front to say how good it was, especially
compared to the wretched verses of stay-at-home armchair poets.^110 Yet
Gibson, confined by poor eyesight to menial work in England, had
written the whole thing up there from newspaper reports, an irony that
testifies to the way ‘realism’ is a genre like any other, but which is also
symptomatic of the second-hand innocence of his poetry. In being honest
or simple, Gibson’s speakers might justify their cliche ́s and hand-me-
down phrases – ‘divine delight’ or ‘goodly gift’ – because the convention-
ality is expressive of the simple sensibility of the person saying them. Yet
in talking about themselves with ‘quiet, keen content’, feeling their
‘tingling’ and ‘lively’ sensations, they display a detached, judicious enjoy-
ment of their own directness, and it was this self-conscious admiration of
sensation that Edward Thomas found he intensely disliked, in both
Gibson and Masefield:
Both write as ‘working men’, and make use of words or actions which are
supposed to look odd in poetry. Yet neither of them is exactly a ‘working man’,
or seems to write of ‘working men’ except in complete detachment, however
admiring. Both, perhaps in consequence, have to make up for some lack of
reality in the whole by intense and often violent reality in detail... they are both
spectators, to some extent connoisseurs.^111
The quotation-marks around ‘working man’ are deadly, for they mimic
the Pateresque, self-congratulatory delicacy of admiration with which
Gibson and Masefield approach their topic, and as Thomas remarked
about Pater himself, ‘literature is not for connoisseurs’.^112 The self-
consciousness endemic in trying for pure experience was the downfall
of Pater and all who followed him, Georgian or Imagist, and Thomas
privately considered it the problem of Rupert Brooke’s poetry as well.
Like Hulme’s definition in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, Brooke once
explained that ‘the point of Art is to present events, emotions, moods, for
their own sake as ends’, and amplified this comment in a review:
‘I saw –Isaw’, the artist says, ‘a tree against the sky, or a blank wall in the
sunlight, and it was so thrilling, so arresting, so particularly itself, that – well
really, Imustshow you!... There!’ Or the writer explains, ‘Just so and just so it
happened, or might happen, and thus the heart shook, and thus.. .’ And
suddenly, deliciously, with them you see and feel.^113
50 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism