Winter

There has been opened at 35, Devonshire-street, Theobalds-road, a 'Poetry Bookshop', where you can see any and every volume of modern poetry. It will be an impressive and, perhaps, an instructive sight.

EDWARD THOMAS, Daily Chronicle, 14 January 1913

At the cramped premises off Theobald's Road in Bloomsbury, Harold Monro was preparing for the opening of his new bookshop. Before the turn of the year, Monro had announced that on 1 January 1913 he would open a poetry bookshop 'in the heart of London, five minutes' walk from the British Museum'. It would be devoted to the sale of verse in all its forms - books, pamphlets, rhyme sheets and magazines - and would be both a venue for poetry readings and the base for an intrepid publishing programme. 'Let us hope that we shall succeed in reviving, at least, the best traits and qualities of so estimable an institution as the pleasant and intimate bookshop of the past.' To Monro that revival meant something particular: wooden settles, a coal fire, unvarnished oak bookcases, a selection of literary reviews lain out on the shop table and, completing the scene, Monro's cat Pinknose curled up beside the hearth.1

The premises stood on a poorly lit, narrow street between the faded charm of the eighteenth-century Queen Square and the din of the tramways thundering up Theobald's Road. The shop occupied a small ground-floor room, twelve feet across and lit from the street by a fine five-panelled window; in the back was an office from where Monro ran his publishing empire. Upstairs was a dignified drawing room where the twice-weekly poetry readings were initially held, and two floors of bedrooms lay above, available to guests at a price of 'a sonnet and a shilling' - or three and sixpence a week in hard cash. Much of the surrounding area had been slum-cleared at the turn of the century when Kingsway was carved through from Bloomsbury Square to the Strand, but not Devonshire Street, which survived in squalor, cluttered by dustbins and vaulting cats. Public houses pinned the street at either end, while along its modest 150 yards traded two undertakers and, by report, a brothel. Many of the buildings were served by a single outside tap, and it was not unknown for passers-by to be hit with fish bones and other scraps cast out from an upstairs window, or chased down the street by boys with catapults. This was the setting for the Poetry Bookshop, in the heart of what one visitor called a 'murderous slum'.2

On 8 January 1913, a week later than planned, the Bookshop officially opened its doors. Poets, journalists, critics, readers, patrons: they came in their dozens, until barely a foot of standing room was left unclaimed. That afternoon and the one that followed, three hundred people crammed into the little shop, filling the staircase and the first-floor drawing room; for the capital's poets it was an occasion not to be missed. Wilfrid Gibson, the most popular young poet of the decade, was already resident in the attic rooms and had only to walk downstairs, while the wooden-legged, self-declared 'super-tramp', W. H. Davies, had hobbled in all the way from Kent. Lascelles ('he said it like tassels') Abercrombie had been invited to open the proceedings, but speculated that to ask a man of his years might seem tactless to the elders (he was about to turn thirty-two); W. B. Yeats diplomatically suggested that perhaps the honour should not befall a poet of any description. But Monro was adamant, and turned to the fifty-year-old Henry Newbolt, then Chair of Poetry at the Royal Society of Literature, to perform the ceremony. At Newbolt's side was Edward Marsh, Secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and editor of an anthology launched that day that would become one of the best-selling poetry series of the century. Among its contributors was the twenty-five-year-old Rupert Brooke, who was in Cornwall that afternoon recovering from the strain of his fraught personal life but who would give a reading at the Bookshop before the month was out. F. S. Flint, a dynamic young civil servant and poet who spoke nine languages, took a place on the busy staircase and told the stranger beside him that he could tell by his shoes that he was an American. The shoes belonged to Robert Frost, newly arrived in London, who confessed that he should not have been there at all:

One dark morning, early in the New Year, or maybe it was late in December, I found myself passing before the window of a shop where a clerk was arranging volumes of current poetry. A notice announced the opening, that night, of Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop. I went in and asked if I might return for the evening. The assistant told me the guests were 'Invited'. But I might try.3

Frost, aged thirty-eight, was a literary unknown without a book to his name and he had come to England to see that changed. Through the Poetry Bookshop he would make an introduction with another American who had achieved the very thing that Frost desired. Ezra Pound was a precocious young poet and editor who, at twenty-seven, had published four collections of his own; he would become closely involved in Frost's drive to publication and would make many appearances in the Bookshop himself. In the time ahead, almost every poet worth their salt would become part of the story of the Poetry Bookshop. T. S. Eliot would be a caller, Wilfred Owen a tenant in the attic rooms. Robert Graves, Charlotte Mew, Frances Cornford, Richard Aldington and Eleanor Farjeon would have books published under the shop's imprint. Others saw print through the shop's journal, Poetry and Drama: Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Bridges, Rabindranath Tagore, Amy Lowell, F. T. Marinetti and Walter de la Mare among them. Others again gave public readings: Yeats recited to a sell-out audience, Wilfrid Gibson performed in a droning monotone; W. H. Davies suffered nerves (cured when he was encouraged to think of the whisky afterwards), Sturge Moore forgot his lines; Ford Madox Hueffer read hurriedly, Rupert Brooke inaudibly, and Ralph Hodgson, who could not tolerate so much as a mention of his own work, simply refused to read at all, while simply no one could silence the actorly John Drinkwater.

The Poetry Bookshop would withstand all weathers: poor sales, infighting, alcoholism, a world war, competition, relocation, expansion and contraction, even romance between the poets and employees. 'All the poets have joined together to hire a big house near the British Museum,' reported the visiting sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, 'where they live and work, and have underneath it a shop where they sell poetry by the pound.' For the next two decades, the Bookshop would be exactly what Rupert Brooke pronounced it to be when it opened that January in 1913: the centre of the New Poetry.4

*

In 1913, a new direction in poetry was desperately needed. The heyday of Victorian poetry was long over. Matthew Arnold had died in 1888, Robert Browning a year later, and the Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson had followed three years after that; the brother and sister Rossettis either side of this eminent trio. Swinburne and Meredith lived on but their best work was behind them, while the curtain had fallen on the risqué fin-de-siècle and their leading lights: Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson had all died as the century turned. The Edwardian decade that followed had left behind a strandline of conservative imperialist verse: Henry Newbolt likening the Englishman at war to a public school-boy at cricket ('Play up! Play up! And play the game!'), while Rudyard Kipling wrote of the Empire's inheritance as 'the white man's burden'. It was 'tub-thumping stuff', Siegfried Sassoon told Rupert Brooke, offensive to some, plain silly to others. But the poet who most typified the inadequacy of the age was the laureate Alfred Austin, a poet considered so terrible that he was better loved for the parodies of his verse rather than anything he wrote. In a hasty ode to the botched 1896 Jameson Raid in the Transvaal (a raid so shambolic that instead of cutting the telegraph wires to mask their position Jameson's company cut a wire fence by mistake), Austin attempted to honour his subject with a dignity reminiscent of Tennyson's 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', but instead he managed only this:

So we forded and galloped forward

As hard as our beasts could pelt,

First eastward, then trending nor'ward,

Right over the rolling veldt,

Bad as they were, these verses might have been quietly forgotten had it not been for an unkind satirist who parodied them yet more succinctly - 'They went across the veldt, | As hard as they could pelt' - a couplet that stuck in the public's craw, forever attributed to Austin, though he never actually wrote it. The mockery of the laureate might have been vindictive (it would worsen), but it was not without purpose; as Ezra Pound put it, 'Parody is, I suppose, the best criticism - it sifts the durable from the apparent.' The treatment doled out to Austin characterised a wider discrediting of Edwardian literature, and when Henry James said of H. G. Wells that he had 'so much talent with so little art' he said as much about Edwardian fiction in...