SOURCE: "Georgian Poetry's False Dawn," in Neophilologus, Vol. LXXV, No. 3, July, 1991, pp. 456-69.

In the following essay, Moeyes discusses Brooke's place in literary history, asserting that he "is a transitional figure, entering a new age for which he was not prepared."

Rupert Brooke is regarded as one of the leading lights among the Georgian Poets, the group of poets Edward Marsh anthologised in his five volumes of Georgian Poetry (1911-1922). The Georgians have largely been ignored since the moment they went out of fashion in the mid-1920s, mainly because the Modernists labelled them reactionary, but more recent criticism has convincingly shown that they were in fact, like the Modernists, reacting against the late-Victorian Tory imperialist tradition, represented by such poets as Kipling, Newbolt, Henley, Watson, and Noyes. The Georgians resented their patriotism, rhetoric and pomposity, and instead wanted a poetry that dealt with even the humblest of...