Edward Marsh and Modern English Poetry

Abstract

The name Edward Marsh occasionally crops up in handbooks on English literature, where he is mentioned as the editor of the five volumes of Georgian Poetry that appeared from 1912 to 1922. Georgian poetry, however defined, has been decried for the best part of a century, and Marsh's reputation among representatives of English Literature has been correspondingly lacklustre. This article presents a radically different view of Marsh, portraying him as the indefatigable promoter of a fresh and vigorous kind of verse that breathed new life into English poetry in the early twentieth century and gained a wide audience for it. A man whose editorial capabilities made poets compare his mind to a razor or a scalpel, he was infinitely generous with his time, his modest wealth and his influence as a top-level civil servant. Largely based on archival research into Marsh's unpublished papers, this reappraisal of Edward Marsh puts him in the foreground of developments in modern English poetry.