The Poetry of Hodgson by Ralph Hodgson
Ralph Hodgson was a notable British poet associated with the Georgian poetry movement, known for his polished and evocative lyrics. Emerging from a background as a self-educated pressman and draftsman from Yorkshire, he published his first collection, "The Last Blackbird," at the age of thirty-six in 1907, quickly gaining prominence among his contemporaries. The Georgian group, which included poets like Rupert Brooke and W. H. Davies, sought to move away from the ornate style of late Victorian poetry, focusing instead on more realistic and fundamental themes rooted in nature and simplicity. Hodgson's work often reflects a deep connection to rural imagery and the natural world, with notable poems like "Stupidity Street" and "The Bull" illustrating his ability to convey complex themes through succinct and powerful language. His poem "Eve" is recognized for its sensuality and lyrical elegance, a departure from the prudery typical of his era. Despite a career that flourished before World War I, Hodgson spent his later years largely out of the public eye, ultimately residing in Ohio until his death in 1962. His later works, while less impactful, highlight the lasting influence of his early poetic achievements.
On this Page
The Poetry of Hodgson by Ralph Hodgson
First published:The Last Blackbird and Other Lines, 1907; The Bull, 1913; Eve and Other Poems, 1913; The Mystery and Other Poems, 1913; The Song of Honour, 1913; Poems, 1917; Hymn to Moloch, 1921; The Silver Wedding and Other Poems, 1941; The Skylark, 1958; Collected Poems, 1961
Critical Evaluation:
Ralph Hodgson wrote very little but remarkably fine poetry through a long life that was mostly removed, though conscious choice, from the bustle of the busy world. A self-educated pressman and draftsman from Yorkshire, he did not publish any collection of verse until he was thirty-six, when THE LAST BLACKBIRD appeared in 1907. The volume included such polished lyrics as “The Linnet” and the title poem, and Hodgson was immediately granted a place of prominence among lyricists of his generation. With his appearance in the second Georgian anthology in 1915, he was indelibly linked, for better or worse, with that group of pre-World War I British poets who have been termed “Georgian” because of King George V and because Edward Marsh, editor of the anthology prophesied another Georgian Age as a result of their talent.
The group with which Hodgson was thus associated consisted of poets as varied as Lascelles Abercrombie, Gordon Bottomley, Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, W. W. Gibson, John Drinkwater, John Masefield, James Stephens, Siegfried Sassoon, and the early D. H. Lawrence and Robert Graves. They had no formal aesthetic—few British poetry groups have ever had—but they did have a number of poetic aims and attributes that linked them, although they themselves were not too much aware of this connection at the time. Though not as resolutely formal in technique as Ezra Pound, or as ready to plum the emotional limits of despair as T. S. Eliot, all the Georgians were like that more famous pair in moving away from late Victorian rhetoric and moralizing towards a more realistic depiction in poetry of the world in which they lived. Reacting against scenes of romantic and patriotic glamor in the poetry of Tennyson and against his obtrusive moralizing, they also avoided the hypnotic rhythms and eccentric themes of Swinburne. They deliberately endeavored to return to the roots of Romanticism associated by them, in scenes of rural simplicity, with the woods, birds, and animals of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley.
This was not merely an attempt to imitate long-dead poets or to retreat from the complex disappointments of the industrial world, but also a genuine effort to re-create the original elements of the Romantic Movement. Poems, Hodgson’s second book, contains several lyrics which succeed in achieving these effects admirably. His short poem, “Stupidity Street,” reprinted countless times since its appearance in this volume, is Hodgson at his quiet but succinct best in his vision of singing birds offered for sale as food in Stupidity Street shops. Following the destruction of the world of nature, he warns, the shops will be empty, with nothing left to sell.
This simple but profound depiction of man’s brutalization of the world is constructed with the compactness of William Blake. In this same volume appeared the longer lyric, “The Bull", for which Hodgson was awarded the William Polignac Prize in 1914. The poem is also characteristic of the transitional movement that carried forward the foremost themes of English Romanticism into an age of aircraft and computers. The old bull is not sentimentalized or made to stand for nature outraged by the ravages of man (as is so often the case in minor Romantic verse). The poem, of thirty sextets in length, dramatizes raw life itself, with the deposed pride of the herd now a gaunt shape of skin and bones standing alone by the edges of the lake waiting for death. Dreams of his younger days, his prowess, his potency, his battles and victories are swiftly recorded, finally returning to the moment of decay when he will become food for the vultures.
Toughness and precision were Hodgson’s constant hallmark when his lyric gift was at its best. “Eve,” his frequently reprinted poem about the fall of man (or woman) in the garden of Eden is also familiar to many who do not know of Hodgson’s career or even his name. There is in the poem a sensuality unusual for Hodgson’s time, which was often characterized by prudery, and a lyrical tautness equal to that of Thomas Hardy. The actual seduction of Eve by the serpent—here a cobra—is watched from afar by a chattering titmouse and a wren, and Eve’s fall is made ominous by this distancing. Even more than the triumph of lewd evil is sensual joy itself—Eve with the berry part way to her mouth—that the reader remembers. A similar effect is created in Hodgson’s brief song about a vagrant girl degrading herself to sell ring tosses at a carnival booth, ancient wildness in her dark eyes like beasts in a den. Such springtime paganism is rare in English poetry at any time, but is perfectly depicted by Hodgson in joyous lyricism set to a musical refrain in “Time, You Old Gypsy Man.”
Though Hodgson’s verse was not escapist, it was not of the 1920’s either. All his work was in adaptation of the ballad meter, and his best efforts were in a dozen lines or so; the few long poems tend to dissipate intensity through repetitious meter and failure to sustain drama from inherently static situations. When Hodgson is at his best, we still think of Hardy. Perhaps this unwillingness or inability to develop led Hodgson to abandon poetry with the 1917 volume. He left England in 1924 for Japan, where he taught English literature at Sendai University until 1938, when he moved to the United States with the Ohio missionary and school teacher he married in the Orient. This most authentic of the British Georgians spent the last twenty-four years of his life, until his death at ninety-one in 1962, residing on a small farm in Minerva, Ohio, a figure almost unknown to the outside world. A small volume, THE SKYLARK, was published in 1958, but this group of resolutely archaic lyrics merely confirmed the indications that his modest but firm talent had had its real fulfillment in pre-World War I London, forty years before.