SOURCE: "John Mansfield and Other Poet-Dramatists," in Modern English Playwrights: A Short History of the English Drama from 1825, Harper & Brothers, 1927, pp. 180-207.

In the following essay, Cunliffe offers an overview of Drinkwater's major plays.

John Drinkwater is primarily a poet. He was associated with Rupert Brooke in the confident and successful effort to create a new poetic age which began in 1912 with the publication of Georgian Poetry and was almost brought to an end after the publication of New Numbers in 1914. In the latter enterprise, which would have been published quarterly if the outbreak of the War had not killed it after its first issue, Drinkwater was one of the four authors concerned, the other three being Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Rupert Brooke; and after Rupert Brooke's death Drinkwater enshrined his friend's memory in one of his Prose Papers (1917). The group had much in common in...