Georgians

The time of the Georgian poets in England was short, scarcely twenty-five years between the twilight of Victoria’s reign and the beginning of World War I. And it was turbulent. From France, the lovely hedonism of Baudelaire was wafting into Bohemian salons in Bloomsbury and elsewhere, promoting sexual freedom and a new model for how artists should behave. From Austria, Freud’s explorations of the unconscious mind suggested a new world much more interesting than the rational mind of the eighteenth century, or the imaginative mind of the nineteenth.

Artists began to follow their urges and write about the results. In The Yellow Book and The Savoy magazines, pages were given over to discussions of sacred and profane love, the pleasure that lies in evil, and the importance of art for art’s sake. All of which was dismissed by others as “decadent”.

Ernest Dowson, A. E. Housman, and Charlotte Mew struggled publicly with unrequited love, writing poems of extraordinary sensitivity and sadness. Anna Wickham and D. H. Lawrence challenged the way we think about men and women, about sex and love, about primitive instincts and polite society. It was a dangerous experiment in new thinking, and there were casualties. Four of the period’s most successful poets died by their own hand. Rarely has poetry so deeply or dangerously sounded the hollows of the human heart.

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns