So wrote Edward Marsh in the valedictory preface to Georgian Poetry 1920–22, in 1922. The anthologies published by Marsh and Monro from the Poetry Bookshop survived one of the most traumatic periods of European history, and continued to promote Georgian work into the 1920s. However, competition provided by rival anthologies, notably Poems of Today (managed by Frank Sidgwick of Sidgwick & Jackson) meant that sales figures were undermined. The proliferation of anthologies by the end of the 1920s caused Robert Graves and Laura Riding to issue a pamphlet, Against Anthologies (1928), arguing that the anthology movement in general prevented the public from buying whole books by modern poets. The arts, too, had undergone a dramatic change during 1914–18, so that the initially scattered and eccentric-seeming ‘isms’ had gained a foothold with the reading public and (more noticeably) with the intellectuals who could further the alternative modernist cause. One of the most consistent driving forces in this direction was Richard Aldington (1892–1962), himself a poet, who had also gained his first publication at the hands of Harold Monro.

Furthermore, two of the most challenging and rigorous Georgians, Brooke and Thomas, were dead. Brooke's death alone caused the cessation of New Numbers in the spring of 1915. It had been a journal with a future and a mission, but quite simply the heart went out of the enterprise once Brooke's death was announced. Brooke lived on as a national icon, but it was another decade before Thomas's poetry began to occupy the position it has today. Frost, tangentially connected with the Georgian movement, returned to America in 1915; and Abercrombie, whose enthusiasm had been channelled into criticism, had given up his dream of being a poet in the country. Drinkwater had seceded even earlier, turning to the commercial drama circuit in preference to the art-dramas he had envisaged before 1917.