The Empire Poetry League was a British-based organisation founded in 1917,[1] with an effective existence of about 15 years.
Initially having a patriotic impetus, and counting a number of leading literary figures among its supporters — G. K. Chesterton, Humbert Wolfe, L. A. G. Strong and the novelists H. E. Bates and A. G. Street (1892–1966) — as members, it shortly became a vehicle for Sydney Fowler Wright (1874–1965), now remembered mainly for his genre fiction.
[1] The League, through Fowler's small press, the Merton Press, was active in the 1920s in producing anthologies of regional verse of the United Kingdom, usually tied to a single county.
It also, true to its name, published early collections from elsewhere in the British Empire: a 1921 anthology Voices From Summerland compiled by J. E. Clare McFarlane in Jamaica, and a series of Dominion and Colonial Verse collections.
The work of the League in publishing new poets made few reputations, and Wright was outspoken against free verse.