Lives Lost, Lines Remembered
Who are The Dymock Poets?
Shortly before the First World War a group of poets gathered in the village of Dymock, in Gloucestershire. Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Gibson rented cottages where they could write in the English countryside. They were joined at times by Rupert Brooke and, John Drinkwater and produced their own magazine, “New Numbers” to promote their poetry.
American poet Robert Frost, joined this community with his young family, and Edward Thomas brought his household for a summer holiday near Frost, in Leddington.
Among many visitors were poets W.H. Davies, Eleanor Farjeon, and Ivor Gurney as well as Edward Marsh (literary patron, and private secretary to Winston Churchill) who edited 5 volumes of “Georgian Poetry” between 1912 and 1922. These anthologies included work by Abercrombie, Brooke, Drinkwater and Gibson, and were published by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, London.1
At the encouragement of Frost in particular, Edward Thomas turned from prose and journalism to become one of the great English poets of the century. The American, Frost, himself gained new impetus. All these “Dymock poets” contributed to the “modernising” of poetry and verse drama. For that moment Dymock became a centre of literary culture.
By the 1930s “New Georgian Poetry” was overshadowed by “War Poets” and other talented new writers, but the influence of all these poets on twentieth century poetry, was considerable.
Thomas, writing 144 poems in less than two and a half years, gave life to a whole new way of considering poetry, in relation to the ordinary speech of humans, and employed those everyday phrases and rhythms into his own work. Other poets have since paid homage to him: Dylan Thomas recorded that, ‘The shy, passionate love he breathed into his compassionate poems lives now in a number of people. His love has multiplied. He has grown, simply and surely, into our language’; Ted Hughes distilled it to ‘He is the father of us all.’
Rupert Brooke’s early death, serving with the Royal Navy, brought his poem ” The Soldier” to national attention in 1915, having first been published in the last ever edition of “New Numbers”.
In November 2014, to mark the centenary of “New Numbers” we launched this project to record and share the heritage of these “Dymock Poets and Friends”. We aim to link our communities in writing about the events of WW1, recording the history of families in Dymock and celebrating the nationally important literary and landscape heritage that blossomed in the region’s “Golden Triangle”.
Richard Simkin
1The Poetry Bookshop was in Devonshire St, Bloomsbury in London until 1926, then it moved, before closing in 1935, three years after Monro’s death. The upstairs room was used for meetings, and was where Frost first met some of the poets. It was run by Harold Monro who was crucial to the Modernising movement in British poetry, from 1913 on.
Image courtesy of George Simmer’s Research Blog
