Arthur Graeme West

Type 'Arthur Graeme West' into Google Images and you will not find his likeness. He is one of those faceless soldier-poets who haunt the outer limits of the literary canon, his memory kept alive only by one or two poems which have recurred sporadically in anthologies of First World War poetry. Gardner, Silkin, Walter and Noakes overlook his work completely; Parsons includes one of his poems in Men Who March Away; and Hibberd and Onions have two in The Winter of the World. Hibberd has proven to be his greatest champion, having edited West's Diary of a Dead Officer (1918, rev. ed. 1991) and written his entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Editing my anthology of First World War poetry for Oxford World's Classics, I have grown particularly interested in those soldier-poets who are responsible for a small number of unforgettable lyrics and no other poetry of note. West belongs in that company, alongside Patrick Shaw Stewart, Julian Grenfell, and T. P. Cameron Wilson. His exemplary works are 'God! How I Hate You, You Young Cheerful Men!' and 'The Night Patrol', the latter being the more brilliant, and lesser known, of the two. The diary in which they were published is equally absorbing, and can be read in its entirety here. (The same site carries the memorial volume by H. Rex Freston which provoked West to write 'God! How I Hate You'.) West's diary is a textbook example of that supposedly commonplace progression from idealism to bitterness, as its author gradually loses his belief in God and his belief in the war effort. 'If there is a God at all responsible for governing the earth,' West concludes amidst the destruction, 'I hate and abominate Him.'

West was killed by a sniper's bullet in March 1917. Here is a good minor poem, nowhere anthologised, which conveys the bewildering—yet liberating—effects wrought on his beliefs by the War:

The End of the Second Year

One writes to ask me if I've read
Of 'the Jutland battle,' of 'the great advance
Made by the Russians,' chiding—'History is being made
These days, these are the things
That are worth while.'
                                        These!
                                                      Not to one who's lain
In Heaven before God's throne with eyes abased,
Worshipping Him, in many forms of Good,
That sate thereon; turning this patchwork world
Wholly to glorify Him, point His plan
Toward some supreme perfection, dimly visioned,
By loving faith: not these to him, when, stressed
By some soul-dizzying woe beyond his trust,
He lifts his startled face, and finds the Throne
Empty, and turns away, too drunk with Truth
To mind his shame, or feel the loss of God.

Keith Douglas Redivivus

'Ted did a beautiful [BBC] programme on a marvelous young British poet, Keith Douglas, killed in the last war... Both of us mourn this poet immensely and feel he would have been like a lovely big brother to us. His death is really a terrible blow and we are trying to resurrect his image and poems...'—Sylvia Plath to her mother, 7 June 1962.

24 January is Keith Douglas's birthday. He would have been 92 today, had he survived the War. His work has meant at least as much to me as that of any other modern poet. I began Modern English War Poetry with the sole objective of honouring his achievement. And although poems about poets are not to be encouraged, I had to write a poem about him. If you aren't familiar with his work, start with the poems, then read that wonder among war memoirs, Alamein to Zem Zem.

What if? By the age of 24, Douglas had already written some of the finest lyrics. Is there a more honest war poem than 'Vergissmeinnicht'? A more brutal description of battlefield detritus than 'Cairo Jag'? A better animal poem than 'The Marvel' or 'The Sea Bird'? Contrast what his near-contemporary, Philip Larkin, had managed at that age. Douglas is the great lost poet of his century.

War Horse Poetry

The most famous horse in war poetry was made out of wood. The Trojans do not seem to have been especially bright.

Poetry of the First World War mentions horses rarely. Hardy's 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"' and Thomas's 'As the team's head-brass' describe horses ploughing the English countryside, and there are passing references to horses at the Front in Hardy's '"And There Was a Great Calm"', Borden's 'At the Somme', Grenfell's 'Into Battle' and Gurney's 'Pain'. The last of these is particularly powerful:

Seeing the pitiful eyes of men foredone,
Or horses shot, too tired merely to stir,
Dying in shell-holes both, slain by the mud.

The story which comes closest to full-blown Spielbergian sentimentality, however, is told by Charlotte Fyfe in The Tears of War, an account of the doomed love affair between May Wedderburn Cannan and Bevil Quiller-Couch (son of Q). In August 1918, Cannan was working for a branch of M15 in the War Office Department in Paris. Two days after the Armistice, she became engaged to Bevil Quiller-Couch, who had come to Paris on leave to propose. Having survived the War and won the Military Cross, Quiller-Couch rejoined his battery in Germany early in 1919, but became ill in early February, and died of pneumonia following flu. The poems in Cannan's second book, The Splendid Days, chart the descent from the exhilaration of the Armistice and reciprocated love, to the devastation caused by her fiancé’s death.

Q acquired his son's warhorse, Peggy, at auction, and brought her back to Fowey where she lived out her remaining years. On first meeting her, Q felt the bond: 'Whether or not she detected something familiar in my footstep when I went into the loose box, she was waiting for me. Took no notice of the stableman, but came straight to me, snuffled me all over the chest and then bent down her neck like "Royal Egypt". While I stroked her, she nuzzled my wrist and back of my other hand... It sounds silly, but it seemed as if the creature really did know something and was trying to say it.'

May remained close to her would-have-been father-in-law, and rode Peggy on her visits to Fowey. She wrote a 32-line poem called 'Riding', which is published only in The Tears of War:

The roads are narrow in Cornwall and set between
Stiff wind-cropped hedges that shelter as you ride;
They were sadder roads and bare that he knew in France
The poplars on each side...

He must have ridden her often, felt the lilt
Of the sure swift strength moving between his knees,
And I came near him a second, riding so,
Dreams, but Love lives by these.

Any other horses?

Edmund Blunden

Edmund Blunden is a war poet about whom I have said next to nothing on this blog. His work will not pass out of copyright in the UK until 2045, which is a long time to wait. So---taking his death date of 20 January 1974 as the slenderest of hooks---I now comment on his achievement via some of the resources which are freely available online. The best of these are the official website, including such gems as a recording of Blunden reading one of his war poems, and the large Edmund Blunden Collection at the First World War Digital Archive.

His biographer, Barry Webb, has suggested that Blunden ‘spent more time in the trenches than any other recognised war writer’. He came through two years at Festubert, Ypres and Passchendaele unscathed, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1916 after reaching the German line on a reconnaissance mission. During a distinguised post-war academic career, Blunden became a champion of war poetry. He edited Owen (1931) and Gurney (1954), wrote the foreword to Frederick Brereton's An Anthology of War Poems (1930) and Brian Gardner's Up the Line to Death (1964), and at Merton College, Oxford, tutored Keith Douglas, who would become the most brilliant poet of the Second World War.

As for his own work, Blunden remained unfailingly modest. In his prose memoir, Undertones of War (1928), he recalled his youthful self as a 'harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat'. The pastoral and the martial pull against each other in all his best poetry. Blunden often gives the impression that he wants to be nothing more than a minor Georgian, complete with archaic diction and mellifluous syntactical inversions; but like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he is transformed into a significant poet at the point when the War forces him to confront a more modern and brutal world. It is artistically regrettable---if psychologically explicable---to find that in The Waggoner (1920) the 'harmless young shepherd' should have so quickly and thoroughly usurped the soldier.

The reprieve was temporary; the War never released Blunden. 'I must go over the ground again', he wrote in Undertones of War, and spoke of a similar compulsion in an interview from the 1960s: 'My experiences in the First World War have haunted me all my life and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.' Where his wartime poems juxtapose soldier and shepherd, the best of his post-war work creates a similar juxtaposition of past and present, soldier and veteran. Blunden is not a poet of protest like Sassoon, or a poet of witness like Owen, or a documentary poet as Gurney and Jones can sometimes be. Blunden is one of the great poets of memory: of what can and cannot be remembered; of what must be remembered; of what would be better forgotten if only that were possible. The act of remembering is itself the drama of his poetry. 'Can you Remember?', written in January 1936, begins with the promise that the poet can 'still remember / The whole thing in a way', although there are gaps and hesitations: 'Edge and exactitude / Depend on the day'. Place-names, Blunden goes on to admit, may be forgotten. But the scene can become suddenly and unexpectedly vivid with an intensity which will not distinguish the happy from the horrific:

       at the instance
Of sound, smell, change and stir
   New-old shapes for ever
Intensely recur.

And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
   Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
   Shrieking, dumb, defiled.

And so on, until Blunden's final poem, 'Ancre Sunshine', which Rennie Parker and Margi Blunden have called 'the last poem about the war published by any surviving soldier poet'. Visiting the battlefields with his wife fifty years later, Blunden ends his poem with a luminous vision:

All that had fallen was in its old form still,
For her to witness, with no cold surprise,
In one of those moments when nothing dies.