Sligo Poets 1912-1923

Poetry 1912

Harriet Munroe started Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in Chicago, with Ezra Pound as foreign editor.

In 1912 three poets, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, (H.D.) and Richard Aldington formulated the principles of what they called Imagist Poetry:
1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

The first of five volumes entitled Georgian Poetry was published in 1912. This covered the years 1911-1912 and poets included were: Lascelles Abercrombie, Gordon Bottomley, Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesterton, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, W. W. Gibson, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, Harold Monro, T. Sturge Moore, Ronald Ross, Edmund Beale Sargant, James Stephens and R. C. Trevelyan.

Georgian was meant to suggest the opening of a new poetic age with the accession of George V in 1910. These poets rejected the strict classicism of the Victorian era and attempted to use simple language and take as their subjects ordinary events and people. However much of their poetry was conventional with an emphasis on romanticism and sentimentality. The style, considered ‘advanced’ at the time fell out of favour in the 1920s as Modernism overtook them.

Some Poetry published in 1912

Robert W. Service, Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, Canada.

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, Indian poet writing in English, published in the United Kingdom

Robert Bridges, Poetical Works Excluding the Eight Dramas.

Walter de la Mare, The Listeners, and Other Poems.

Rudyard Kipling, Collected Verse.

Ezra Pound, American poet published in the United Kingdom: Ripostes, London.
Translator, The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, London.

Isaac Rosenberg, Night and Day.

Dora Sigerson, New Poems.

James Stephens, The Hill of Vision.

Amy Lowell, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass.

Claude McKay of Jamaica, published the first collections of English-language, Creole dialect poetry.

Anna Akhmatova, Evening, her first collection, Russia.

Patrick Pearse, Mise Éire ("I am Ireland"), Ireland.

Irish poet James Stephens
(1882-1950)

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)