Rhymers' Club

The Rhymers' Club was a group of

Café Royal.^[2]

Those who took part also included

attended some meetings that were held in private homes. The group as a whole matched quite closely Yeats' retrospective idea of 'the tragic generation', destined for failure and in many cases early death.

Along with the social element of the Rhymers' Club, they published two volumes of verse. The first, entitled The Book of the Rhymers' Club was published by

Edwin J. Ellis, and Ernest Rhys

.

This seemingly dualistic existence of the club (i.e. on one hand meeting informally at the Cheshire Cheese or in private homes; on the other hand producing anthologies of verse) makes determining the club's members rather tricky at times. There are certain poets who were known to have attended meetings but never had their verse appear in either of the books. Also, certain poets feature in one book without featuring in the other. What is certain is that all the members were men.[3]

By the time Arthur Ransome wrote his Bohemia in London in 1907, the group had already passed into legend: "... the Rhymer's Club used to meet, to drink from tankards, smoke clay pipes, and recite their own poetry". In fact, Ransome's research was less than thorough; the group continued to meet in some form until about 1904.^{[citation needed]}

References

^ The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2010)
^ Bernard Muddiman (1921) The Men of the Nineties, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York
^ Jad Adams, ‘Rhymers' Club (act. 1890–1895)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press. accessed 26 Jan 2017

Jeffares, A. Norman
, W.B. Yeats: A New Biography, (Hutchinson 1988).

References

Further reading