The Dymock Poets - Sean Street

 By far the best take on this unique event.   In August 1914, just as the western part of World War I was beginning, a group of poets came together in a cluster of Gloucestershire villages.  Some came and went, others lived there anyway, and another couple stayed just for the month.   Those that had families brought them with them.   The ostensible purpose, of four of them at least, was to oversee the poetry journal they had set up.   The gathering is important because the fourth and final issue of New Numbers, published the following spring, contained Rupert Brooke's war poems including 'The Soldier' which was to make him, for one week only, the most famous living poet in the world and thereafter the most successful poet that has probably ever lived.   His royalties, which he left to Walter de la Mare (who wasn't at Dymock) and Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, who both lived there, funded them for the rest of their lives and, even though Btooke has been dead 111 years now and is long out of copyright, the interest on his bequest may still be funding poets today.

The fourth New Numbers poet was John Drinkwater.   He was a middling poet at best and didn't need Brooke's monetary support.   He had a day job as director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the first purpose-built repertory theatre in the world, funded by Birmingham millionaire Barry Jackson.   In 1918 Drinkwater would hit the bigtime with his play Abraham Lincoln, a massive success on both sides of the Atlantic.   Street covers this in his book, which is fair enough, because all the Dymock poets wrote plays - and the famous poet who lived close by, John Masefield, had broken through as a playwright before jump-starting the revival of popular English poetry with The Everlasting Mercy (actually set in one of the 'Dymock' villages) in 1911.

That village was Ledbury, where Masefield was born and where the other wing of the Dymock poets were to be found in August 1914.   One wasn't English, the other wasn't yet a poet, and Street rightly gives a significant amount of scrutiny to their side of the story.   Robert Frost and Edward Thomas were much older, rising forty.   Frost, later the 'American Poet Laureate' who recited at Kennedy's inauguration (Masefield, of course was the English one at the time), hadn't broken through in his homeland.   So in 1912 he moved his family to England, initially settling in a bungalow in Beaconsfield.   In London he met the poets who gravitated to the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury.   Frost attended the opening; Gibson was actually living above the shop at the time.   Initially Frost was swept up by his compatriot Ezra Pound, but Imagism was not Frost's style and he soon moved on to Gibson, and through Gibson, Abercrombie.   Abercrombie was already living in Dymock (technically Ryton).   Gibson, Abercrombie, Drinkwater and Brooke were all heavily featured in the first Georgian Anthology (1913), an enormous success which funded the bookshop for the next twenty years.   Because the editor, Edward Marsh, chose to publish his contributors alphabetically Abercrombie came first and the other three were all well to the front and thus more likely to be read.   Gibson, who had been publishing for almost twenty years by this point, was independently breaking through in America.

Ar the end of 1912 Gibson got married.   His American earnings enabled him to move out of his room above the bookshop, and he naturally chose to rent near his friend Abercrombie (who had been able to rent in Ryton because his sister had married the lord of the manor).   In 1914 Frost, who had managed to publish two books of verse, joined them, only a mile or so across the fields in Ledbury.   In October 1913 Frost had met the leading poetry critic of the day, Edward Thomas, who had done wonders for the sales of Gibson, Abercrombie, Brooke, Drinkwater and Frost himself.   Thomas, who was profoundly depressed and in danger of breaking down under the pressure of hack journalism, became incredibly close to Frost.   He visited Ledbury many times in 1914 and decided to rent a local farmhouse for the whole of August.   The Ledbury group mingled with the Dymock group.   Thomas's other emotional support, the future children's writer Eleanor Farjeon came for a week or so.   And Brooke came down in the hectic weeks between his return from America and enlistment.   One evening they were all together in Gibson's home, The Old Nailshop.

Thomas, at this time, had never written a poem, but Farjeon and Frost persuaded him to try.   By the time he was killed in action at Arras on April 9 1917 he had written 147 poems and had a collection about to come out.   All of this Street manages to cover in 160 pages.   Of course there are things that could be developed further - personally I would and shall keep the plays for a separate monograph - but as a reliable, thorough and impeccably sourced account of a fascinating interlude I have not found anything better (and, believe me, I have read dozens).

Abraham Lincoln - John Drinkwater

 

Abraham Lincoln is the play that made John Drinkwater famous on both sides of the Atlantic.  He produced it at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, which he ran, in October 1918.  It then transferred to London and became an enormous hit, even though - as everyone said at the time - it had none of the usual attributes of commercial theatrical success.  There is no love interest, no jokes.  Any real conflict is either offstage or internal until the very last moment.  There are no surprises.  Barely any continuity.  Instead we jump from Lincoln at home, accepting nomination, to the White House a year later,  then two years later, then Appomattox, April 1865, and finally Ford's Theatre, a few evenings later.

What the play had, however, and what the English public desperately wanted to see as the world's worst war finally ended, was a moral hero who justified the bloodshed and pledged reconciliation.  This, of course, is not what Allied politicians ultimately delivered, but it was absolutely what the public wanted.  And it is beautifully done.  Drinkwater was a minor Georgian poet who dabbled in verse drama before he wrote Lincoln.  He was also a man of the theatre.  His father had walked out on a secure teaching job to go on the stage.  Drinkwater himself had been with Barry Jackson, who had founded and built the Birmingham Rep in 1913, for more than a decade.  He knew what the public wanted and he provided it.

The history is accurate enough, but it is revealed subtly and only when absolutely needed.  Nobody's character develops much except for Lincoln, who undergoes every bit of suffering during the bloody Civil War but keeps on going because do so is the right thing.  He frees the slaves.  He lets the defeated Confederate cavalry keep their horses to till the land.  And as we all know, for this he was shown no mercy.  The assassination, which we all know is coming, is handled in the only way it can still be shocking - in a true coup de theatre, which must have been a nightmare to stage (Barry Jackson himself designed the sets).

Traces of the conventions of the English Arts Theatre movement survive in the poetic chorus of two 'chroniclers'.  These are easily ignored for the modern reader.  We will simply say, this is why Drinkwater was the least successful of the core Georgian poets.  He made up for it by being a much better playwright than any other (and, for those who don't know, all the others wrote plays).

John Masefield - Muriel Spark

I never realised Muriel Spark wrote literary criticism. In this case she basically wrote it twice - in 1952, long before she was famous, and a thorough revision in 1991, when she was a literary icon. We are regularly reminded of this duality throughout the text.

It is a short book in which she essentially focuses on three narrative poems of some length, The Everlasting Mercy (1911), Dauber (1913), and Reynard the Fox (1919), none of which I have read. It doesn't matter. Spark convinces me that I ought to and that these are significant of their type. She benefits, of course, from having met Masefield who gave amiable support throughout the first version in 1952. Equally, he benefits from having Spark to defend him, being everything he was not - modern (in the day), young and female.

We think of Masefield as the poet of the sea, and Dauber is indeed the story of an aspirant painter who goes to sea, but it was The Everlasting Mercy that made him famous (very famous, almost overnight), the story of a Victorian rustic hooligan who sees the light. I really must look it up.

Rupert Brooke, His Life and Legend - John Lehmann

I have been reading a lot about Rupert Brooke lately, in connection with a couple of personal projects of which, hopefully, more later. There are a fair few works on Brooke but the vast majority suffer from an obvious problem - length. Brooke was astonishingly busy, he wrote a lot from an early age, he had an enormous social circle and he travelled the world. But even so, he was only 27 when he died, and you simply can't justify 500+ pages for a life that short.

John Lehmann (1907-87) came of an astonishingly intellectual and creative family. His sister Rosamund was a novelist, his sister Beatrix a highly-celebrated actress. John was a poet and publisher. He founded New Writing in 1936, became a managing director of the Hogarth Press in 1938 and founded his own firm, John Lehmann Limited, in 1946. Finally, in 1954, he started The London Magazine. It's all very close-knit, a bit incestuous, and a bit artsy-craftsy. Which made him the perfect author for a critical biography of Rupert Brooke, who was a beneficiary and part-creator of similar arrangements before his ludicrous death in 1915. Best of all, Lehmann can do in 170 pages what Brooke's other biographers can't manage in several hundred pages. He brings Brooke alive in all his contradictory aspects - obsessed with women but offensively dismissive when the mood takes him; flirting with homosexuality but keeping his patron Eddie Marsh, who worshiped him, at a very resolute arm's length; globetrotting but always trying to micromanage his English friends. He was not a nice man but he was extraordinarily beautiful. He was a talented poet, more gifted than most in his day but did not live long enough to become truly great. And, as Lehmann says, he has been abandoned by the lirerary world which prostrated itself before his metaphorical shrine in 1915, in favour of those who came shortly after him and who lived long enough to experience the true horror of mechanized war: Sassoon, Owen and Graves.

Lehmann treats Brooke's service in a respectful and fair manner. Brooke was a volunteer, as everyone was in 1914. He did not ask Marsh, who was Churchill's secretary, to get him a safe billet in the Royal Navy Voluntary Reserve and it soon proved not to be particularly safe. Lehmann is better than most is describing Brooke's single experience of being under fire, in the long-forgotten farce of the British attempt to relieve the German siege of Antwerp. And let us not forget that Brooke was en route for the Dardanelles and the mass slaughter of Gallipoli when sunstroke did for him.

For anyone wanting to dip their toe into Brooke studies and come away with solid facts and a sound appraisal of his achievements, I cannot recommend Lehmann too highly.