The Dymock Poets - plus one?

Living less than twenty miles from Dymock, I have long been an admirer of the six poets who bear the name of that pretty Gloucestershire village, and I'm a member of the Friends of the Dymock Poets (which exists to keep alive their memory and their work). This year sees their centenary - it is a hundred years since that brief but intense period of creativity blossomed and flourished with such superb results.

The Dymock Poets were not always six in number however. The name was first given to four of the poets - Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfred Gibson, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas - in the 1930s. John Drinkwater and Rupert Brooke were added in the 1950s by the then vicar of Dymock, an enthusiastic local historian. And now it's been proposed that another poet should be added - Eleanor Farjeon.

If you don't know about Eleanor Farjeon - or perhaps only that she wrote "Morning Has Broken" and many plays, stories and poems for children - do look her up and read some of her work. Perhaps her well known friendship with Edward Thomas, to whom she was devoted, has obscured her own achievements. She was an established, published poet before she met the Dymock friends, was a faithful chronicler of some of their meetings and wrote extensively throughout her life.

In the past could it be that her gender stood in the way of her acceptance as a Dymock Poet? I have a strong feeling that that might have been the case; in the forthcoming ballot of Friends to decide the issue, I shall certainly be voting for her adoption.