Critics have long been anxious to keep good poets uncontaminated by the term ‘Georgian’. There are grounds for this, as I shall touch on later, but Georgianism was not only one thing. C. K. Stead noted that ‘a chorus of critics begins its remarks on D. H. Lawrence's poetry by saying that he was “not a Georgian”’, then added:

‘Immediate experience’, ‘a language close to common speech’ – these phrases denote key ideas and I will return to them. Pound's Imagists may soon have looked more innovative, but the Georgians were just as clearly ‘marked off from their immediate predecessors’.

In the beginning they seemed dramatically so, to their editor – ‘this volume is issued in the belief that English poetry is now once again putting on a new strength and beauty’ – and to the public and reviewers, notably Lawrence himself in an article on ‘The Georgian Renaissance’: ‘But we are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning.