Misplaced Pages

#557442

17-723: The Poetry Society is a membership organisation, open to all, whose stated aim is "to promote the study, use and enjoyment of poetry". The society was founded in London in February 1909 as the Poetry Recital Society, becoming the Poetry Society in 1912. Its first president was Lady Margaret Sackville . From its current premises in Covent Garden , London, The Poetry Society publishes The Poetry Review ,

34-544: A Liberal government minister who had resigned his post in opposition to the declaration of war, and Ramsay MacDonald who resigned as Chairman of the Labour Party when it supported the government's war budget. Also taking a key role in setting up the Union were politician Arthur Ponsonby , author Norman Angell and journalist E. D. Morel . Following an initial letter circulated on 4 September 1914, an inaugural meeting

51-549: A factor in her refusal, the main reason was that they were of different religions. Sackville was Roman Catholic , while MacDonald was raised in the Presbyterian Church , later joining the Free Church of Scotland . Sackville never married. At the outbreak of World War I , she joined the anti-war Union of Democratic Control . In 1916 she published a collection of poems called The Pageant of War . It included

68-724: A poetry magazine. Established in 1912, its current editor is the poet Wayne Holloway-Smith , who succeeded Emily Berry in 2023. Berry herself succeeded Maurice Riordan in 2017. Fiona Sampson was the magazine's editor from 2005 to 2012. The society organises several competitions, including the British National Poetry Competition , the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, The Popescu Prize , The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and

85-556: The Pall Mall Gazette . She published her first book of poems, Floral Symphony , in 1900. In 1910, she edited A Book of Verse by Living Women . In her introduction, she noted that poetry was one of the few arts in which women were allowed to engage without opposition and made a direct connection between women's social freedom and the freedom of the imagination. When the Poetry Society was formed in 1912, Sackville

102-561: The Geoffrey Dearmer Award . The society also ran the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize from 1986 to 1997. This article about a literary society or organization is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Margaret Sackville Lady Margaret Sackville (24 December 1881 – 18 April 1963) was an English poet and children's author. Born at 60 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair , Sackville

119-579: The British war effort. The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) provided general backing and most of the funds for the Union came from wealthy Quakers. There were also close links between the Union and the supporters of women's suffrage . By 1917 the UDC had more than a hundred local branches across Britain and Ireland, and 10,000 individual members; it also had affiliations from organisations which represented 650,000 more. It became increasingly influential in

136-592: The Labour Party, to which its members increasingly graduated due to the continued support for the war from the Liberals. The UDC criticised the Versailles Treaty as being unjust to Germany, and also advocated the withdrawal of Allied troops from Russia . A. J. P. Taylor said the UDC was "the most formidable Radical body ever to influence British foreign policy". At the end of the war, no thought

153-662: The absence of overt patriotic elements in The Pageant of War and its memorialisation of all the dead: soldiers, non-combatants and refugees. She spent much of her adult life in Midlothian and Edinburgh , where she became the first president of Scottish PEN and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature . She was a member of Marc-André Raffalovich 's Whitehouse Terrace salon , where she would meet guests including Henry James , Compton Mackenzie and

170-540: The artist Hubert Wellington. In 1922, she published A Masque of Edinburgh . This was performed at the Music Hall, George Street, Edinburgh , and depicted the history of Edinburgh in 11 scenes, from the Romans to a meeting between the poet Robert Burns and the writer Sir Walter Scott . Sackville lived at 30 Regent Terrace , Edinburgh, from 1930 to 1932. In 1936, Sackville moved to Cheltenham , where she lived for

187-575: The direction in which the Society was heading soon became obvious—poetry was made an excuse for pleasant social exchanges, for irrelevant snobbery, for the disagreeable consequences of organised association." She had a passionate 15-year love affair with Ramsay MacDonald , recorded in letters they wrote to each other between 1913 and 1929. MacDonald was a widower and repeatedly proposed to her, but she declined to be his wife. His biographer David Marquand speculated that, although social considerations were

SECTION 10

#1732780683558

204-451: The poem "Nostra Culpa", denouncing women who betrayed their sons by not speaking out against the war. Her sister-in-law, Muriel De La Warr, and her nephew, Herbrand Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr , were also involved in the peace movement. Her brother, Gilbert Sackville, 8th Earl De La Warr, was killed during the conflict in 1915. The spare and angry strength of Sackville's war poems has attracted recent critical attention. Brian Murdoch notes

221-659: The rest of her life. She died of a heart condition at Rokeby Nursing Home, Cheltenham, in 1963. Somerville, Georgina (ed.) (1953). Harp Aeolian: Commentaries on the Works of Lady Margaret Sackville . Cheltenham: Burrows Press. Union of Democratic Control The impetus for the formation of the UDC was the outbreak of the First World War , which its founders saw as having resulted from largely secret international understandings which were not subject to democratic overview. The principal founders were Charles P. Trevelyan ,

238-667: Was given to disbanding the Union and it continued to be active through the 1920s. In the first Labour government in 1924, fifteen Government ministers were members of the UDC. As time went on, the UDC became more supportive of outright pacifism and Arthur Ponsonby published his pacifist statement Now is the Time in 1925 under UDC sponsorship. Ponsonby also started a petition of those who "refuse to support or render war service to any government which resorts to arms", and in 1928 published Falsehood in War-Time which claimed that public opinion

255-461: Was made its first president. She had also been the first president of its predecessor, the Poetry Recital Society, formed in 1909. Joy Grant, in her biography of Harold Monro , writes that Sackville "spoke well and to the point at the inauguration, hoping that the Society would 'never become facile and "popular", to turn to a merely trivial gathering of persons amiably interested in the same ideal'. Her half-expressed fears were unfortunately fulfilled:

272-536: Was organised for 17 November. While non-partisan, the UDC was dominated by the left-wing of the Liberal and Labour Parties. The Union did not call for an immediate end to the war but for a full examination of the war aims in public and by Parliament. It did strongly oppose conscription and wartime censorship along with other restrictions on civil liberties. As a result of this, the UDC was denounced by right-wingers such as The Morning Post newspaper as undermining

289-491: Was the youngest child of Reginald Windsor Sackville , 7th Earl De La Warr . She was a second cousin of Vita Sackville-West . She began to write poetry at an early age and when she was 16 became a protégée of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt . With his encouragement, she had her early poems published in periodicals such as The English Review , the Englishwoman's Review , Country Life , The Nation , The Spectator and

#557442