Baldick defines Georgian poetry as (emphasis added)
a body of English verse published in the first half of George V's reign (1910–36) in five anthologies edited by Edward Marsh as Georgian Poetry (1912–22). (...) The term Georgian is only rarely applied to the literature of the period of the first four Georges (1714–1830).
Applying the term "Georgian" to literature published under George I–IV is so rare that Cuddon's dictionary of literary terms, which is more exhaustive than Baldick's, does not even mention it.
As Braithwaite writes in his preface,
This anthology, according to the editor's intention, includes those poets born under the four Georges, who seem to represent the rise and development of a distinct poetical epoch. It does not include such poets as Tennyson, Browning, Rosetti, and Arnold (born under George IV.), who formed by the growth of a new temper in their work from 1840 onwards, the Victorian school.
(Today, Rosetti is typically described as a representative of the Pre-Raphaelites. Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and the Pre-Raphaelites are still considered as Victorian authors; the term "Victorian school" is rare today, as far as I know.)
A small part of what Braithwaite calls the Georgian period is now referred to as the Augustan age, during which authors such as Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, Goldsmith and Steele imitated the style of poets such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Tibullus (the original Augustan poets, who were active during the reign of Roman emperor Augustus). This period began around 1700 (either with the publication of Dryden's Virgil translations in 1697 or with the accession to the throne of Queen Anne in 1702) and ended with the deaths of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, in 1744 and 1745, respectively (see Cuddon's and Baldick's entries on "Augustan Age").
Another part of the period covered in Braithwaite's anthology is now referred to as the Romantic era. In a narrow sense, this refers to the period between the publication of the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 and 1832, the year in which Walter Scott and J. W. Goethe died and the Reform Act was passed (see Cuddon's entry on "romantic revival"). Braithwaite's concept of romanticism appears to be wider (see page xiv in his preface), since he situates the roots of romanticism in the early eighteenth century, even though he considers the Lyrical Ballads as a landmark publication that heralded in a "splendid period of song".
The differences between Augustan and Romantic literature are significant enough for modern scholars to regard them as different periods, rather than lumping together as Braithwaite did (let alone applying the label "Georgian" to them).
Another series of anthologies published during the same time period as Braithwaite's was edited by Edward Marsh (already mentioned above). In the preface to Georgian Poetry 1911–1912, first pubished in 1912, Marsh wrote,
This collection, drawn entirely from the publications of the past two years, may if it is fortunate help the lovers of poetry to realize that we are at the beginning of another “Georgian period” which may take rank in due time with the several great poetic ages of the past.
The five anthologies edited by Marsh (Georgian Poetry 1913–1915 etcetera, available on Archive.org) include poems by Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, James Elroy Flecker, W. W. Gibson, W. H. Davies, Harold Munro, J. C. Squire and a number of others who were considered members of the same poetic movement. Others whose poems were occasionally included were D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and James Stephens.
Characteristics of the Georgian movmenent include the use of language close to common speech, an emphasis on honesty instead of public rhetoric, and using common life as a poetic subject (as opposed to the retreat into aestheticism in the works of Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson). However, as an avant-garde movement, they were soon outrun by modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who started publishing their work in the same decade. (Preminger and Brogan, page 461–462.)
References:
- Baldick, Chris: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2001. (280 pages)
- Cuddon, J. A.: The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Third edition. Penguin 1992. (1051 pages)
- Preminger, Alex; Brogan, T. V. F. (editors): The New Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton University Press, 1993.