The georgian poets and the genteel tradition

This chapter analyzes the ways in which the categories-a genteel tradition, a Georgian poetry-circulated and functioned as primarily nationalistic. It seeks to clarify and complicate the received history of the literary scene at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century in both America and England. The "genteel tradition" is understood to refer to American poetry before it found its footing. Genteel poets imitated English Victorian poetry too closely, which led their poetry to become "stale, unadventurous, and conventional", hopelessly nostalgic, prudish, feminine, " and "enervated". Unlike the fairly abstract "genteel tradition, " the term "Georgian" is attached to a series of five anthologies, published by Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop and edited by Edward Marsh between 1912 and 1922. In the years between 1912 and 1922, England's sense of itself and of what kind of poetry would or should represent it was changing.