The Poetry of Harold Monro

Early twentieth-century English poetry has become something of a critical backwater, with the term ‘Georgian’ rarely used as anything other than a term of disparagement. True, a few poets from that period – Edward Thomas and Robert Graves spring to mind – are still read with pleasure, but the work of most of their Georgian contemporaries is largely forgotten, apart from a handful of hardy perennial anthology pieces.

Michael Cullup finds the current neglect of Harold Monro’s poems a particularly grave and galling literary injustice, as he amply demonstrates in this critical appraisal and selection of his best poems. In these poems, Monro eschews the easy sentimentality long associated with the period, striving towards greater realism and psychological truth. Whether as a poet, editor of Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama or through his Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, Monro acted as an sensitive mediator between the Georgians and the Modernists. Much of his work was highly respected by both T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The Poetry of Harold Monro is an important milestone in the revaluation of this unjustly neglected poet.

About the author:

Michael Cullup is a poet, critic and education writer. He has published eight volumes of poetry, the most recent being Giving Up Fictions (2003), A Change of Season (2010) and Matelot (2016). His most recent critical publications are The Poetry of Robert Graves (2012) and W.H. Davies: Man and Poet (2014).

132  pages

ISBN: 978-1-910996-25-6