George Darley by Alice Meynell

Name: George Darley
Author: Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell’s “George Darley” is a critical reassessment of a neglected nineteenth-century poet, arguing that Darley’s flaws are real but less important than the flashes of radiance, spaciousness, and lyrical delicacy in his verse. Meynell begins with Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s anxious question about whether English poetry should be entrusted to the sentimental L. E. L. or the “violent” George Darley. She treats the question as historically instructive: poetic ages may pass through weak intervals without poetry itself being endangered. Darley’s “violence,” in her account, lies chiefly in diction: his effort to reopen English to Latinized and unusual words, resisting the fashionable Teutonic plainness of his time. Meynell grants the ambition but objects to some results, especially his affected quaintness and awkward compounds, which can make even native English words seem like slang. The essay then turns deliberately from Darley’s faults to his beauties. Meynell stresses that his poetry possesses “life, light, and distance,” especially brightness of gold and blue, even if it lacks deeper human passion. She admires isolated visionary phrases from “Nepenthe” and values his gift for landscape, breadth, and luminous atmosphere. Darley’s dramatic and fairy writing receives mixed judgment. Meynell frankly calls fairies a dull literary subject, yet finds charm in “Sylvia, the May-Queen,” especially in its delicate fairy speeches and comic rustic scenes. She sees Darley as an Elizabethan imitator, closer to the prettiness and verbal play of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” than to Beddoes’s darker dramatic intensity. His comedy is derivative but not merely tedious, and his verbal ingenuity sometimes justifies the Shakespearean borrowing. The essay’s strongest praise is reserved for Darley’s lyric power. Meynell singles out the fairy song beginning “Where can my young beauty be” for its ancient rhythm and beauty, while lamenting how quickly he relapses into inferior anapaestic movement. She also admires his famous lyric “It is not beauty I demand,” noting that it once passed convincingly for a seventeenth-century poem in the “Golden Treasury.” This becomes proof of Darley’s remarkable ability to inhabit an earlier poetic idiom with tact, mood, and technical grace. Overall, Meynell presents Darley as an uneven poet: sometimes affected, sometimes archaic, sometimes metrically vulgar, but capable of rare verbal brightness, spacious imagination, and authentic lyric elegance. His reputation, she implies, should rest not on claims to greatness but on the preservation of those moments where his poetry truly shines.

By Alice Meynell · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary criticism, Biographical essay, Poetry criticism · 1,236 words

First lines

It was Beddoes who gave this half-forgotten poet, his contemporary, the name of violence. Being conscious of the brief and unimportant pause of poetic inspiration during which they lived, Beddoes wrote a letter of dismay wondering whether it were to the sentimental L. E. L. or to the violent George Darley that the trust of English poetry should be committed. It was, as we now confess with peace of mind, to neither; and there is a lesson to be learned from the desperate question-to the effect that all is not lost because an interregnum befalls and the crown of poetry is visibly put by. Beddoes was in distress for his twenty years or so. The twenty years close up in the natural perspective, and the utterance of that anxiety sounds futile and uneasy, breaking in upon sounds of more moment.

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George Darley is listed on Textopian as an essay by Alice Meynell, dated 1922 CE.

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Work type: Essay
Author: Alice Meynell
Date: 1922 CE
Language: English
Genres: Literary criticism, Biographical essay, Poetry criticism, Literary history, Essay
Length: 1,236 words
Structure: 1 section, 18 paragraphs
Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)

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Genres

Literary criticism — The work evaluates George Darley's poetry, diction, imitation of Elizabethan models, lyric technique, faults, and beauties.
Biographical essay — It treats Darley as a historical literary figure, discussing his reputation, disappointment, contemporaries, and place in nineteenth-century poetry.
Poetry criticism — The essay closely analyzes poetic language, rhythm, imagery, versification, and selected lyrics and dramatic verse.
Literary history — It situates Darley among writers such as Beddoes, Shakespeare, Wotton, Carew, Coventry Patmore, and the compilers of the Golden Treasury.