Critical Essay | Critical Essay by R. S. Gwynn

Critical Essay by R. S. Gwynn

SOURCE: Gwynn, R. S. “Subject Matters.” Hudson Review 52, no. 2 (summer 1999): 323-31.

In the following excerpt, Gwynn compares Dickey's work and declining critical reputation to that of the Georgian poets, especially Rupert Brooke.

No group of poets has suffered worse at the hands of posterity than the Georgians, whose poems were collected in five eponymous semiannual anthologies. The last of these had the misfortune to appear in the same year as The Waste Land, and after Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Middleton Murry had finished mopping the floor with it, the Georgians were consigned to the back matter of the history of modernism. Of their number, none has been devalued more than Rupert Brooke, who is remembered chiefly as the poster boy for British army recruitment, the result of the great popularity of “1914,” the sonnet sequence he wrote in the last year of his life. Brooke, who by...
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