While waiting for the poet

The Newbolt Report must be seen as one of the major initiatives in cultural rebuilding following the trauma of the Great War. Yet the ambitions of Newbolt's team were by no means confined to the immediate consequences of the War. They took within their scope the impacts of the long Industrial Revolution, and their work is underpinned by a critique of fundamental aspects of national educational policy since the 1840s. The ‘vast new territory’ which the awaited poet must ‘invade’ (237) is portrayed as a desolate wasteland of cultural impoverishment not unlike that diagnosed a few years later by Q.D. and F.R. Leavis and the Scrutiny circle. This chapter does not seek to discount the faint aura of gentrification that permeates the text, but suggests looking back at Newbolt from more recent perspectives that allow us to trace a more radically ‘modern’ vision within its pages.