Are the Dymock Poets Still Relevant?

The Georgian Poets encompassed a range of styles, topics and issues. As part of this movement the poets in Dymock helped to change the way poetry was written. Before the war poetry was far more widely read then it is today. There were fewer technological distractions. During the reign of George V  (1865-1936) poetry began to undergo a transformation.

The time of the Dymock Poets was one of transition between the age of Tennyson, with its long verses of rhyming romantic poetry to shorter poems expressing feelings, human emotions, paring poetry down to the essentials.

As U A Fanthorpe says in “Dymock:  The Time and the Place “cutting out the verbiage from poetry” This trend enabled war poetry to be written and for T S Elliot to write ‘ The Waste Land’ which caused a sensation when it was published in 1922.

The Georgian Poetry anthologies produced by Edward Marsh were hugely popular and nurtured new talent including Robert Graves and D H Lawrence.The Dymock Poets writing in the countryside produced 4 volumes of poetry that sold well. The war in 1914 to 1918 overshadowed their work and the Georgian period fell into a natural decline. The friendship of the Dymock Poets nurtured their writing and saw 3 of their company become well known. Today Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas’ books are the most well-known of the poets with their work still in print. John Drinkwater, Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Gibson may have waned in popularity but without their initiative, in Abercrombie’s case as a catalyst by coming to live in Ryton, the others would not have settled here or visited the area.

‘New Numbers’ was a best seller and the poetry anthologies helped to make their reputations as poets. Their work can still be found in anthologies today. Poetry began to evoke a sense of place, a moment in time, an expression of feelings for a place or event, emotions, thoughts, responses to a landscape or scene.  For others this may come through a sense of history of a place and time, appreciating the nature, music, landscape, ties to place, heritage, literature or art. Poetry is a form of expression, encapsulating in words feelings, emotions and a sense of being and belonging.

As well as making an impact on a national level the Dymock Poets wrote about the local area – their houses, family and events which gave sense of place in their poems. The landscape fed into their poems and today the poems inform the landscape.Their poetry focusing on nature, the countryside, and the lives of ordinary people is still a theme in modern poetry today. Landscape in poetry still continues to have a hold on us. The echoes of their time are in the paths and roads they walked which are still here. The sight and sounds of nature can still be found, although not in the abundance they may have known.  They came seeking a rural idyll, something that many of us still do today. People move to the countryside in search of a less hectic lifestyle, away from the hustle and bustle of town life. Many local people now run businesses from home which is what the Dymock Poets were doing with ’New Numbers’.

At Ryton, Greenway, Leddington
And Dymock, lanes have memories;
Sound is a memory time preserves,
And here a walker’s footfall travels far
Beyond his step under the stars first frosts’.
(Sean Street. 2006)

Jackie Tweedale

 

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