In reference to Rosenberg's estrangement from both
Georgianism and the avant-garde, we must refrain from idle supposition as to with which group he ultimately would have aligned--given the resources at hand his extant work should instead be read as a conclusive dissatisfaction with both modes.
He argued that the three main claims of '
Georgianism' were: that it would cheapen land; that it would prevent the accumulation of land in a few hands; and that it would stimulate the productiveness of land.
It is certainly an austere, puritan view of poetry but refreshing after Yeats's pseudo-philosophies, the pedantry of the later Auden, the lingering
Georgianism of Graves and the neurotic verbosity of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
This poetry is largely mainstream in the tradition of late
Georgianism. These are on the whole poets eager to share ideas, feelings, selves as well as skills with nifty, even histrionic use of metaphor and image, precision in language, and competence with traditional poetic elements.
McArthur's 'New Zealand Singing', is a confused collection of unassimilated Whitman and Eliot advocating rejection of sentimental
Georgianism and facing the problems of the age, 'serious things', not 'rata flowers'.
Typically, Osbert the polemicist chose to ignore the many pieces of first-rate work which had been published in the Georgian Poetry volumes, and his clever modern dismissiveness did not find favor everywhere: Eliot, for example, expressed contempt for "the poets who consider themselves most opposed to
Georgianism and who know a little French."
They reacted against Victorianism,
Georgianism, genteelism, the academy, the establishment, the rules and conventions, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Swinburne, Bridges--the whole suffocating past.
The earlier poetry has tinges of
Georgianism, even Romanticism or a touch of Dylan Thomas, while the later verse gives a broadly postmodernist impression.
Curnow was even more specific, targeting
Georgianism as representative of the sorts of excess that Gill complained of.
To begin with a poem of 1956, 'Miri' shows among other things how Hart-Smith made his exit from the
Georgianism of his first published poems of 1934 and after.