Tuesday 31 March 2009
Hating your neighbour
'You must love your enemies at home at least better than your enemies abroad or it ends the nation.' --- Robert Frost, Notebooks, p. 304.
'I wish the Bosche would have the pluck to come right in & make a clean sweep of the Pleasure Boats... and all the stinking Leeds and Bradford War-profiteers now reading John Bull on Scarborough Sands.' --- Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters, p. 568.
'Besides my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true.'
--- Edward Thomas, 'This is no case of petty right or wrong'.
I take it that the fat patriot is Bottomley, although on this question Edna Longley's otherwise exhaustive edition remains silent.
Saturday 28 March 2009
Patrick Deer: Culture in Camouflage
This is an essential study for any account of Home Front cultural life before and during the Second World War. However, the list of writers named in chapter titles and subtitles betrays something of a bias: Ford Madox Ford, Rex Warner, Virginia Woolf, Humphrey Jennings, Henry Green, James Hanley, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Alexander Baron. Deer's study is not the first to suggest (albeit through omission) that poetry is distinct from 'literature'; the ghettoising of poetry in recent critical developments has been widely remarked. But what a shame that a scholar as good as Deer should spend such little time on poetry. It may be, of course, that after Owen and Sassoon, poetry during World War 2 is less susceptible than other literary forms to the blandishments of power. Even so, that case needs to be prosecuted.
Those small portions of the book devoted to poetry are by far the weakest. Early on, Deer badly misquotes 'Dulce et Decorum Est' ('Behind that wagon we flung him in' is a wooden version of what Owen wrote: 'Behind the wagon that we flung him in'). On the subject of mistranscription, who shall 'scape whipping? (Cf. 'Futility' in my Modern English War Poetry). But when Deer gives two perfunctory pages to Keith Douglas, one paragraph to Sidney Keyes, and three name-checks to Alun Lewis, we suspect that here may be someone uninterested in poetry. For example, quoting from Douglas, Deer misses stanza breaks; Alamein to Zem Zem becomes 'From Alamein to Zem Zem'; 'simplify me when I'm dead' turns into 'simplify me when I am dead'; and the great ending of 'Desert Flowers' --- 'Lay the coin on my tongue and I will sing / of what the others never set eyes on' --- gets mangled into 'of what others never set eyes on'. Deer mulls over the 'ambiguity' of 'others': needlessly, because the ambiguity is caused by his own error.
In studies of Second World War literature, it can sometimes seem as if every prose hack of the period has been lavished with attention. Meanwhile, major poets are dismissed in a page or two of slapdash references. Deer has written an insightful and provocative study of what he inaccurately calls the 'literature' of the war. Someone needs to do the same for the poetry.
Thursday 26 March 2009
A Short Post About Killing
I can think of only two other poems about killing which deserve to be bracketed with 'How to Kill'. The first is Hardy's Boer War poem, 'The Man He Killed', in which the protagonist tries to escape from his own experience ('I shot at him as he at me') into the generalities of the second-person pronoun ('You shoot a fellow down'). The second is Siegfried Sassoon's 'The Kiss':
To these I turn, in these I trust;
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal;
I guard her beauty clean from rust.
He spins and burns and loves the air,
And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.
Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.
Sassoon wrote some years later that the poem had been inspired by a lecture on the use of the bayonet in which the lecturer, a major, had spoken with 'homicidal eloquence'. Bullet and bayonet, the major reported, were brother and sister. Sassoon was puzzled by 'The Kiss', feeling that he never could have 'stuck a bayonet in anyone', but admitting that the poem 'doesn't show any sign of satire'.
There is, as Sassoon admits, little reason not to take the poem as a strange sadistic fantasy. The bayonet is eroticised --- but eroticised, disturbingly enough, as the soldier's naked 'sister' whose very kiss is fatal. The 'kiss' is itself a curious description, covering up a sexual metaphor which is more obviously thrusting and penetrative. And yet the bayonet's gender resolutely resists the metaphor's logic, so that the poem is at war with itself, at once revealing and withholding, accepting agency and shifting agency from soldier to bayonet. Paradoxically, in its tongue-tied confusions 'The Kiss' comes as close to homicidal eloquence as any poem from the First World War.
Saturday 21 March 2009
Send Andrew Motion to Afghanistan
Some of Motion's own poetry I quite like, but when it comes to war poetry he is of the 'sad shires' school, uselessly wringing his hands over the pity and futility of it all. His afterword to 101 Poems Against War, with its bland anti-war rhetoric and its assumption of an easy consensus, infuriated me. Motion doesn't want war poems to challenge or dismay or unsettle him; he only wants poems which keep harmony with his melancholic mood music. As he has approvingly stated, 'We can guess what attitude poets will take to a conflict before we read a line they have written about it.' Predictability has become a poetic strength.
Motion acknowledges one regret during his tenure as Poet Laureate: 'I wish ... that someone had flown me to Iraq and Afghanistan and encouraged me to write about the wars in those places.' Andrew, with your connections you could have made it happen, and you didn't. You still can. Instead of sighing like a poor man's Edward Thomas about what might have been, why not take inspiration from a Canadian poet, Suzanne Steele, who will be going out to Afghanistan as a war artist later this year? I, for one, would be genuinely keen to read your poetry from the war zone. Rather that than an official poem about the Queen Mother's birthday.
Friday 20 March 2009
Frost/Gurney/Haines
Sunday 8 March 2009
Dymock Poets and Friends
So, quite a lot of Thomas; and that emphasis is borne out by the checklist at the back of the issue which collects together all the books and articles published on any of the six Dymock poets during 2008. Thomas has thirteen items listed, Frost six, Brooke two, Gibson and Abercrombie one, and Drinkwater none at all. Thomas's reputation has never been higher. Matthew Hollis has chosen the right time to publish a biography (due from Faber next year). I might as well confess that, much as I believe Thomas to be a terrific poet at his best, I would choose Frost every time. Thankfully, I don't have to choose.
The Friends of the Dymock Poets deserves support for all its excellent work. Its regular meetings (of which the next is on 28 March) give members a chance to hear interesting talks in a friendly atmosphere. 5 miles south of Ledbury, and a dozen miles from the Malverns, Dymock is set amidst some of the finest scenery in England. I never need very much of an excuse to visit the area.
Friday 6 March 2009
Is there an American War Poetry?
Having published a book titled Modern English War Poetry, I am in no position to be dismissive about national categories. Had I referred to British rather than English, I would still be writing it now. All books need to end somewhere, and as I had a large temporal range --- from the Boer War to the present --- I felt entitled to narrow the geographical focus. But there was a political imperative as well. Whatever the various reactions of English poets to the nation and their government, Scottish and Welsh nationalisms take a fundamentally different attitude both to Westminster and to established symbols of Englishness. More than that, I wanted to claim that the ways in which English war poets talk to each other during the last century do constitute a tradition; not a simple tradition, not even a linear tradition, but a tradition perhaps in the sense of a shared awareness, community or engagement. For example, when Keith Douglas decorates a photograph of himself in his army finery with the words 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori', he looks to assault a poetic tradition (while reinstating an allegiance to an Horatian one); but that breaking is itself an acknowledgement and a continuation of a drama played through Wilfred Owen's poetry. Owen uses his predecessors to create a discordant antiphony; Douglas uses Owen in the same way.
I am not sure that the same can accurately be said of American war poetry. Goldensohn doesn't say it, although the book's blurb does: 'While the birth of a national identity is documented in early poems, the anthology also conveys the growing sophistication of a uniquely American style.' Reading the many wonderful and not-so-wonderful poems from the eighteenth-century Colonial Wars to (many would argue) those new colonial wars in the Persian Gulf, I am not convinced that the anthology's contents support that claim. Poetry is not a branch of science: it does not progress. And talk of a 'uniquely American style' risks belittling a nation which upholds among its self-evident truths the freedom of the individual; the freedom, that is, to choose to be different. America is nothing if it is not various; it seems too vast to have one 'style'.
None of this detracts from Goldensohn's anthology, which is quite appropriately a collection of the best war poems written out of a particular nation. War poetry does not seem to be part of a national psyche in the States as it is in England; there is no Yankee Brooke or Owen. The best poets in the book --- Emerson, Whitman, Stevens, Frost, Bishop, etc. --- are what we might term occasional war poets. Whitman (as always) comes closest to an exception, and the story of how Drum Taps influenced English war poets like Gurney and Rosenberg has still not been fully told. Whitman is, with 8 poems, the most heavily-represented poet in Goldensohn's anthology, and as war poet he stands head and shoulders above the others. Yet when we think of Whitman's crowning achievements, we probably think first of 'Song of Myself', 'I Sing the Body Electric', or the elegy for Lincoln.
Goldensohn's introductions to each war are excellent, but one line made me smile: 'The United States is still considered the key to the victory of 1918.' Far be it for me to want to start a transatlantic bunfight at a time when we British attempt to salvage a 'special relationship' from our position of utter powerlessness, but this comes close to the Oh What a Lovely War version of history. The hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who fought in the war certainly didn't harm the Allied cause... and yet it would be more diplomatic to drop the definite article. American entry into the war was, undeniably, 'key'.
Thursday 5 March 2009
Modern English War Poetry
Tuesday 3 March 2009
Edward Thomas's Birthday
March the 3rd
Here again (she said) is March the third
'Tis Sunday, and the church-bells end
Do men mark, and none dares say,