chapter 2
Edward Thomas in ecstasy
The list of poets who might have been published inGeorgian Poetry
crosses some interesting boundaries of literary history. A. E. Housman
refused as he felt himself too old; Ezra Pound was asked but since
Georgian Poetrywanted only recent work and Pound was reluctant to
excerpt anything from his forthcomingRipostes, he was left out.^1 As
Georgian Poetrygained more of a reputation, its admissions became more
selective, and so despite the enthusiasm of their Georgian backers, Robert
Frost was considered too American, Charlotte Mew too unusual, and
Edward Thomas too posthumous.^2 But the fact that Thomas, of all
people, never appeared inGeorgian Poetrymight not be the flagrant
injustice it seemed at the time to his supporters, for his opinion of it
was, at best, ambiguous. On the one hand, Leavis was wrong to think that
‘only a very superficial classification could associate Edward Thomas...
with the Georgians at all’, since many of them were his friends and
companions.^3 Always close (or as close as the prickly Thomas ever got)
to de la Mare, he also spent holidays with the Gibsons and Abercrombies,
had Rupert Brooke to stay, and had actually shared a writing cottage with
W. H. Davies, whose work he promoted generously. He had faintly
hoped to be in the second Georgian volume himself, and when his
reviews summarised the Georgian ethos as the ‘modern love of the simple
and primitive, as seen in children, peasants, savages, early men, animals,
and Nature in general’, the gentle mockery is being turned on his own
prose work too.^4 On the other hand, he was consistently critical of the
poetry that actually appeared in the Georgian anthologies. ‘The only
things I really much like were de la Mare’s and perhaps Davies’s’, he
commented to Frost about the second volume, just as he had singled out
their work as the only complete achievement in the first.^5 He was scathing
about the 1915 Georgian spin-off called New Numbers: Abercrombie
‘applies the lash’, Drinkwater is ‘hopeless’ and Gibson ‘for me, almost
equally so’.^6
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