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Edward Richard Buxton Shanks

The information on this page is a biographical sketch for Edward Shanks; offering the reader a basic knowledge of his life and work.There are some suggestions at the bottom of this page for resources and links that should help those looking for additional information.

Edward Richard Buxton Shanks is recognized today as a War poet having served in the military during the first World War and also as a Georgian poet.

Edward Shanks: Born June 11, 1892 in London and died May 4, 1953.

Education: Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Cambridge - Received a Bachelors of Art in History in 1913.

Occupation: Edward Shanks was a bit of a renaissance man in the literary world. He was a writer, poet, academic, journalist, literary critic, and biographer.

• 1912 - 1913 - Editor of Granata while attending Trinity College, Cambridge
• World War I - he served wtih the British Army in France.
• 1915 he was allowed to serve out the remainder of the war doing administrative work after being invalided out.
• 1919 - 1922 held the position of literary reviewer for the London Mercury.
• 1926 he was a lecturer at the University of Liverpool.
• 1928 - 1935 he was the chief lead-writer for the Evening Standard.

List of Works:

• Songs (London: Poetry Bookshop, 1915)
• Poems (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1916)
• The Old Indispensable; A Romance of Whitehall (London: M. Secker, 1919)
• The Queen of China; and other poems (London: M. Secker, 1919)
• The People of the Ruins: A Story of the English Revolution and After (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1920)
• The Island of Youth: A Poem (Privately printed for the author, 1921)
• The Island of Youth: and other poems (London; Glasgow: W. Collins Sons, [c1921])
• First Essays on Literature (London: W. Collins Sons & Co. ltd. [c1923])
• Mr. D. H. Lawrence: some characteristics (1923)
• Bernard Shaw (London: Nisbet, 1924)
• The Shadowgraph and other poems (London: W. Collins, [c1926])
• The Beggar's Ride: A Tragedy in Six Scenes (London: W. Collins, c1926)
• Collected Poems, 1909-1925: Arranged in Six Books (London: W. Collins, 1926)
• Second Essays on Literature (London: Collins, 1927)
• Queer Street (London: Macmillan, 1932)
• The Enchanted Village (London: Macmillan, 1933)
• Poems, 1912-1932 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1933)
• Old King Cole (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1936)
• Edgar Allan Poe (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1937)
• Do You Know?: A Question Book (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1939)
• The King of all Dogs (1939)
• Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Literature and Political Ideas (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1940)
• The Man from Flanders, and other poems (Kingsway, England: St. Clements Press, 1940)
• The Night Watch for England, and other poems (London, Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1942)
• Elizabeth Goes Home (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942)
• The Universal War and the Universal State (London: Dropmore Press, 1946)
• Images from the Progress of the Seasons (London: Dropmore Press, 1947)
• The Dogs of War (London: Dropmore Press, 1948)
• Poems 1939-1952 (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1954)
• First Essays on Literature (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1968)
• Second Essays on Literature (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1968)
• Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Literature and Political Ideas (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1970)

Work best known for: The Queen of China and Other Poems (1919) of which Edward Shanks won the first Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature.

Critical Response: Edward Shanks was the first recipient of the Hawthornden Prize in 1919.

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War Poets

" War poets (act. 1914–1918) is a convenient, though somewhat diffuse, term referring primarily to the soldier–poets who fought in the First World War, of whom many died in combat. The best-known are Richard Aldington, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Hamilton Sorley, and Edward Thomas. Most of these writers came from middle-class backgrounds; many had been to public schools and served as officers at the front. In fact, hundreds of ‘war poets’ wrote and published their verse between 1914 and 1918, often capturing the initial mood of excitement and enthusiasm, although only a handful—largely those who wrote in protest—are read and admired today, with Wilfred Owen achieving an iconic status within British literature and culture. Other war poets whose work appeared between 1914 and 1918 were not involved in fighting. The Times supplement, War Poems, August, 1914–15, for example, included contributions from established civilian poets such as Robert Bridges, Rudyard Kipling, Laurence Binyon, and Thomas Hardy. Catherine Reilly's 1978 bibliography of English poetry of the First World War lists over 3000 works by 2225 poets. More than half of this war poetry was written by male civilian writers and a quarter by women. A recent interest in the work of such women poets as Vera Brittain, Margaret Postgate Cole, Rose Macaulay, and Charlotte Mew has also significantly extended understanding of war poetry of the period."
(Oxford DNB)

"A precise definition of the term war poet, which has been considered by poets from Robert Nichols to Philip Larkin and Andrew Motion, has never been fully agreed upon. While early anthologies like E. B. Osborn's The Muse in Arms (1917) and Robert Nichols's Anthology of War Poetry, 1914–1918 (1943) focused largely on the work of soldier–poets, Brian Gardner's Up the Line to Death: the War Poets, 1914–1918 (1967) also included poems by non-combatant writers, though it too was a collection of male authors. More recent anthologists have questioned limiting the definition of war poetry to the work of a group of predominantly well-educated, largely middle-class soldier–poets. Catherine Reilly's anthology Scars upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse (1981), for example, opened up a new and important area of experience and expression, and was enthusiastically received. Reilly's title came from the first line of ‘To My Brother’ by Vera Brittain, who served from 1915 as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) and who lost her fiancé, brother, and two of her closest male friends during the war."
(Oxford DNB)

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List of War Poets

• Edward Godfree Aldington (1892–1962)

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Georgian Poets

"Georgian poets (act. 1912–1922) is the name commonly given to the forty writers who contributed to one or more of the five volumes of Edward Marsh's anthology, Georgian Poetry (1912–22). Unlike their contemporaries the imagists the Georgians had no agreed programme and were in no sense a literary school. Indeed the only workable definition of a Georgian poet is that his or her work (there were briefly two women among the forty) appeared in Marsh's anthology. Critics have sometimes tried to evade this definition, claiming that some contributors, such as Thomas Sturge Moore, were too old and others, notably D. H. Lawrence, too original to qualify as Georgians. But Marsh chose a wider range of work than he is often credited with, while Lawrence appeared in four of the five volumes and was the most enthusiastic reviewer of the first: ‘we are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning’ (Rhythm, March 1913, quoted in Rogers, 102) . Arguably the first of the Georgians was Wilfrid Gibson, who decided in 1905 that a poet should write in simple language about the life of his own times. By 1910 he was well known. In 1911 John Masefield's notorious verse narrative The Everlasting Mercy, as well as work by Harold Monro, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Rupert Brooke, gave promise that a long period of stagnation in English poetry was coming to an end."
(Oxford DNB)

"It is usually accepted that Georgian Poetry was the brainchild of Rupert Brooke and Edward Marsh (then private secretary to Winston Churchill at the Admiralty). According to Marsh it was on 19 September 1912 that Brooke half flippantly suggested shocking the public by publishing a book of new, unconventional poems of his own, disguising it as work by twelve imaginary poets. Marsh saw that the authors might as well be real: there were plenty of good young poets whose work needed publicizing. Next day he and Brooke held a lunch party for Monro and Arundel del Re, respectively editor and assistant editor of the Poetry Review, as well as Gibson, who had recently moved to London, and John Drinkwater, who had not met Marsh before and seems to have been taken along by Monro."
(Oxford DNB)

"Monro was crucial to the project and perhaps its true originator. Only a few weeks earlier, as Marsh and the others knew, he had rented a house in Bloomsbury to be a Poetry Bookshop, a centre for young poets and for the publishing, sale, and reading of their work. He had launched the Review in conjunction with the Poetry Society at the start of the year and was keen to build on its success. Monro had also coined the phrase ‘Georgian poets’ in 1911, the year of George V's coronation, and he may well have talked of an anthology of poems from the Review. At any rate, he readily agreed to publish the book that Marsh proposed. The lunch party decided, amid some doubts, that the title should be Georgian Poetry, 1911–1912. Marsh would have sole responsibility as editor and would make good any losses; profits, if any, would be shared between the Review and the editor, who would distribute his half equally among the contributors. In November the magazine announced that the new book, to be ‘edited by E MARSH’ and published by the Review, would be ready when the bookshop opened on 1 December. (Marsh at once asked for anonymity, although his identity was never a secret.)"
(Oxford DNB)

"In late November the Poetry Society suddenly fired Monro as editor of the Review, having found him alarmingly progressive. The anthology had to be delayed, presumably so that its imprint could be changed from ‘The Poetry Review’ to ‘The Poetry Bookshop’. But when the first copies went on sale in mid-December, customers at the new shop proved eager buyers, and before long Georgian Poetry, 1911–1912 was selling in extraordinary quantities, to the astonishment of its editor and contributors."
(Oxford DNB)

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Georgian Poets

• Sir Edward Howard Marsh (1872-1953)
  
  
• Thomas Sturge Moore (1870–1944)

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