Yet the one other Georgian poet whom Thomas was very interested in
was the one poet who was a Georgian and by all accounts shouldn’t have
been: D. H. Lawrence. Or rather, by all accounts except Thomas’s,
because in a review of the first volume of Georgian Poetry, Thomas
crowned Lawrence one of the three poets at the ‘core of the group’ (the
others were Rupert Brooke and the long-forgotten E. B. Sargant), and
explained his judgement a month or so later:
Ten years ago the survivingYellow Bookmen would have been pleased with Mr
D. H. Lawrence’s subjects, enraged with his indifference to their execution. Nor
would they alone have been enraged, and not only Mr Lawrence would have
given offence. They would have contracted a chill from so much eagerness both
to come at truth and to avoid the appearance of insincerity, the fidelity to crudest
fact in Messrs Abercrombie, Gibson and Masefield, the fidelity to airiest fancy in
Mr de la Mare, and to remotest intuition or guessing in Mr Brooke, the mixture
everywhere of what they would have called realism and extravagance.^7
Lawrence’s eagerness for truth and sincerity places him at the head of
this list of Georgians, and not because Thomas was basing his judgement
on anthologised poems or ignoring Lawrence’s brand of free verse.
Rather, it was exactly his verse-form that made him so utterly sincere:
It is obvious at once that the poems would be impossible in ‘In Memoriam’
stanzas, for example. Their metrical changes, like their broken or hesitating
rhythms, are part of a personality that will sink nothing of itself in what is
common. They have the effect which Whitman only got now and then after a
thousand efforts of rhymeless lawlessness. Mr. Lawrence never runs loose. You
can call him immoral or even incontinent, but not licentious. He is no more
licentious than a dervish. Moreover, his senses are too wakeful and proud. He
sacrifices everything to a certain mood, emotion or frame of mind, but nothing
to fine lines, or to false emphasis. There are no ‘fine’ verses or lines of the usual
sort, and the whole of the poem is intense and unchangeable like some of the
beautiful single lines of old, when poets were still rhetoricians...sohonest and
patently vivid are they that no man can regard them as foreign to him.^8
Thomas here makes the same link between free-verse form, total
concentration on the object and personal sincerity that Pound and Hulme
were in the process of theorising. It was exactly these qualities that he
admired in the Imagist F. S. Flint, whose poems inDes Imagisteshe called
‘a sincere and sensitive attempt to write poetry without admitting any
commonplaces of verse, in form, language, or sentiment’.^9 When Thomas
concluded another review of Lawrence, then, with the comment that
Lawrence’s free-verse form is ‘as near as possible natural poetry’, his
adjective is striking.^10 For a ‘natural poetry’ would be what Thomas
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 65