The Hurt Locker: 'War Poetry'?

The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's highly acclaimed Iraq war film, has just been released in the UK. It comes with the promise that the war will be freed from the guilt and sentimentality which, many suggest, have blighted war films in recent years.

I'm intrigued by this review from the astute Kevin Maher in today's Times. This is how he ends his eulogy:

As such, [the film] speaks of greater concerns than the absurdity of a war that very few people wanted. In fact, with its eye for ground-level reality and sympathy for the soldier as cannon fodder, it has more in common with Wilfred Owen’s 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' than Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

For, in short, in its gutsy, bare-bones beauty, The Hurt Locker is not simply a war movie. It is war poetry.

There are several fascinating assumptions here. It is pleasing to see 'war poetry' evoked as the gold standard for artistic representations of war. Cinema has little need for poetry except when there are lively biopics to be made: the last decade or so has seen films about T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and (most recently) John Keats. So when a film aspires to the condition of poetry --- even if only in the eyes of a reviewer --- it acknowledges a value system distinct from commercial imperatives. The Hurt Locker escapes its genre. Its closest kin, Maher suggests, is Wilfred Owen, not Stanley Kubrick.

Maher's comparison also draws on an assumed peculiarity of war poetry. If something is described as 'poetical', that description suggests an embellished beauty, a gorgeousness which is full perhaps even to excess. Maher refers to 'beauty', but this is 'a gutsy, bare-bones beauty', concerned with 'ground-level reality'. War poetry, then, is beautiful because realistic, unrhetorical, and tough ('gutsy'); war poetry is unpoetical.

That being the case, 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' is a strange example to choose. Maher's allusion to 'the soldier as cannon fodder' brings to mind the poem's opening line: 'What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?' Yet 'bare-bones' Owen's style is not. As Geoffrey Hill has argued, Owen remains in thrall to 'a residual yet haunting echo of ... nineteenth-century rhetoric', and 'applies a balm of generalized sorrow at a point where the particulars of experience should outsmart that kind of consolation.' The melancholic music of the 'sad shires' is an escape from circumstances which Owen elsewhere faces more candidly. The bare-bones poet is not Owen but Keith Douglas, who describes his style as 'extrospective' ('regarding external objects rather than one's own thoughts and feelings' --- OED), and who tells one correspondent that 'To be sentimental or emotional now is dangerous to oneself and to others.'

Kevin Maher gives the film five stars (out of 5). That is, The Hurt Locker is good enough to be a poem.

Soldiers' Love Poems of the Spanish Civil War and Beyond

A desperately sad story here about the 'lost children' of the Spanish Civil War. I came across it while looking for John Cornford's 'Huesca', to check the justice of Valentine Cunningham's claim in The Cambridge Companion to War Writing that 'Huesca' is 'one of the most moving soldierly love poems in the English language'. I own Hamish Henderson's lightly annotated copy of Cunningham's Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, which almost certainly includes 'Huesca', but it's in work and I'm at home.

'Moving soldierly love poems': what other contenders are there? If by 'love poems' Cunningham means romantic love (and therefore rules out, say, Owen's 'Greater Love'), then I would add Keith Douglas's 'Canoe' and his masterpiece-in-miniature, 'To Kristin Yingcheng Olga Milena'. (Strictly speaking, each can be disqualified on a technicality, the first having been written just before he signed up and the second serving as a loving farewell to love.) There must be others --- though surprisingly few except for the homosocial and homoerotic poems of the First World War. Any poems for or about lovers back home?

Here is my chapter on Auden's 'Spain' and his later poetry of the Sino-Japanese war. A shame that Auden's much-revised set-piece, which he disliked and eventually tried to suppress, has eclipsed the many Anglophone poems to have come out of Spain by Cornford, Spender and others.

And here is Cornford's 'Huesca', written for Margot Heinemann. Cornford was killed, aged 21, a few months after it was written. The rhyme grave/love is grimly to the point.

Heart of the heartless world,

Dear heart, the thought of you

Is the pain at my side,

The shadow that chills my view.

The wind rises in the evening,

Reminds that autumn is near.

I am afraid to lose you,

I am afraid of my fear.

On the last mile to Huesca,

The last fence for our pride,

Think so kindly, dear, that I

Sense you at my side.

And if bad luck should lay my strength

Into the shallow grave,

Remember all the good you can;

Don't forget my love.

Update: I forgot Keith Douglas's 'The Knife'.

The Idea of War Poetry as a Burst Blister

I was on BBC Radio Wales this morning, discussing the soldier-poets of Iraq and Afghanistan and comparing them, in two minutes flat, to their First World War predecessors. The BBC had taken its lead from this story in yesterday's Sunday Express: 'Like a blister burst by the unbearable chafing of the Afghanistan conflict, war poetry has come back into the public domain.' That's some image --- war poetry as a blister emptied of its, well, its contents. Or perhaps the image got out of control, and war poetry was meant to be the contents rather than the blister, which would explain why it grabbed the public's attention as it exploded everywhere.

Photograph courtesy of the excellent Photobucket.

Americans Honour The Dead of the Great War

Watch CBS Videos Online

Click on the video above for an affecting piece from CBS about the graves of American servicemen who were killed fighting in Belgium during the Great War. (A shame about the prefatory advert...) Lines from the Canadian poet John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields' are heard twice.

Should the whole poem be read at commemorative events? McCrae's final stanza is an appeal from the dead for the living to keep fighting: 'Take up our quarrel with the foe'. Failure to do so would be an act of 'break[ing] faith with us who die'. That is, McCrae has recruited the dead to promote his belief that the War must be fought to the end, and that peace would constitute a betrayal of fallen colleagues. It is a brilliant piece of propaganda, lulling its audience with the rondeau's repetitions and pastoral imagery, before sneaking its strident politics into a suitably sonorous conclusion.

Google Discussion Groups

Here are two Google discussion groups which deserve support. I've linked to this one, 'Modern War Poetry', previously. The other is 'World War One Literature', which includes a mostly (and perpexingly) positive thread on Duffy's 'Last Post'. No one mentions 'bled bad blood'...

The 'Real' War Poets

Responding to Carol Ann Duffy's call for a 'new war poetry', Erica Wagner has set about finding 'the poets whose experience of conflict is direct, intimate, everyday'. She collects their work here --- poems from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Gaza. Her article is provocatively titled 'The real war poets'. Although she describes Duffy's commissioning of 'a slew of modern war poetry' as 'wholly admirable', the challenge to those British and American poets who have the comfortable benefit of writing 'at a distance' is loud enough. Old arguments about witness and entitlement are still alive, and still divide.

The Times website has not treated line-breaks and stanza-breaks in Wagner's selection kindly. That makes judgements about the poems treacherous. The only anglophone poem, Brian Turner's 'Ashbah', is not his strongest: it reads like Keith Douglas by numbers, with its lost and wandering revenants, desert wind, 'trash', and narrow alleys. As for the others, poetry in translation may be better than no poetry at all, but it is impossible to gauge how these poets sound. 'During my long, boring hours of spare time I sit to play with the earth's sphere', one poem begins. Shouldn't it be 'sit and play'? Is 'boring' not implied and therefore redundant? Shouldn't the 'earth's sphere' be replaced by 'a globe'? Who's at fault: the poet or the translator? It may not be a coincidence that what seems like the most impressive poem, Dunya Mikhail's 'Pronouns', is also the one which lends itself most readily to translation.

This selection is a valuable start, and I hope that Erica Wagner will expand it over time. So far, plenty of countries are represented, but by very few poems and poets. A much fuller offering from any given war or country would make it easier to understand the poetic traditions at work.

Dymock Poets AGM Weekend

The Friends of the Dymock Poets have just announced details of their AGM weekend. It will take place on 3-4 October at the Burgage Hall, Church Lane, Ledbury.

Talks on Saturday 3rd include Jess Owen on Wilfrid Gibson (pictured above at the Old Nailshop, scene of 'The Golden Room'), and Dominic Hibberd and Vivien Noakes on their respective anthologies of First World War poetry. On Sunday, a literary walk from Pauntley Church to Durbridge Mill will make reference to 'Dick Whittington, John Masefield, Robert Frost, Jack Haines and to local customs.'

No Time to Stop and Stare

More World War 2 posters with sound advice here.

On the other hand, we should be grateful that Louis MacNeice paid no attention to these conventional wisdoms. Coming out of his house to watch a bombardment at 4am one morning, he found his neighbour already spectating with 'a connoisseur's detachment'. This is the scene which MacNeice describes:

'There was a violent crackling and hissing from the fire downhill, and a rich autumn smell of burning wood. And beyond my house the sky was a backcloth for opera or ballet, a sumptuous Oriental orange-print mottled with bursts of black and rolling like water so as sometimes to bury the moon — a half-moon that looked very clean and metallic in this welter of colour.'

MacNeice concludes that the fire is 'very beautiful', 'infinite' in its variety, and capable of 'subtleties never attained by any Impressionist painter.' No wonder people stood and stared.

Update: For the benefit of those of you who have arrived here looking for W. H. Davies's 'Leisure', here it is.

David Bromwich: 'How Moral Is Taste?'

Here is a close-up of Edmund Burke's statue in Bristol. Notice the (bullet?) holes, which are thought to have appeared during the early months of 2008. Whether they were made by a malcontent objecting to Burke's politics or philosophy, or just by a bored teenager who took advantage of a handy target, no one seems able to discover. One correspondent, at least, seemed to approve of the vandalism. Robspierre [sic] has claimed that 'Edmund Burke is rightly not liked in Bristol as he opposed the French Revolution and its ideals'. I spent many years working in Bristol, and never heard views expressed on Burke or on the French Revolution. I conclude that I was moving in the wrong circles.

That a man whose own writings anatomised the extremes of human emotion can still provoke such a response is a lovely irony. But just as it is too early to say what the consequences of the French Revolution will be, so Burke's legacy is still shaping modern debates about art and aesthetics. Burke is, for example, the inspiration for one of the best essays of our times: David Bromwich's 'How Moral Is Taste?', collected in his Skeptical Music. The book (and the first four pages of the essay) can be sampled here. Its readings of twentieth-century poetry are nigh-on flawless.

Skeptical Music devotes little time directly to war poetry. 'How Moral Is Taste?', the book's final essay, takes as its main literary example Robert Frost's 'The Bonfire', which Frost himself described (inaccurately) as his only poem about the First World War. But even there, it is not so much the example chosen, as the potential applications for Bromwich's argument, which ought to revise (I want to say 'revolutionise') the ways in which we read war poetry. I will try to explain why, but the usual caveat applies: I can only do summary justice to Bromwich and to Burke, in the hope of directing interested readers to the essay itself.

Bromwich tests a case which Burke makes in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). There, Bromwich explains, Burke boldly identifies the 'human taste for catastrophes' with the same taste for art. This touches on the question of why we find tragedy pleasurable; as Burke puts it, 'We delight in seeing things, which so far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be to see redressed'. Burke goes on: 'I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others; for let the affection be what it will in appearance, if it does not make us shun such objects, if it makes us dwell upon them, in this case I conceive we must have a delight or pleasure of some species or other in contemplating objects of this kind.' As Bromwich explains more pithily, 'what is simply repellent simply repels.'

Burke proposes, then, that sympathy has none of the benevolence which we normally associate with the term. Rather, it is merely the fascinated observance of suffering in another creature. The same instinct which makes us rubber-neckers at the scenes of motorway crashes informs our response to art. We may draw on all kinds of excuses and strategies of denial, but we take what Bromwich calls 'an active and to some degree a delighted interest in scenes of suffering'. Bromwich has little time for the argument that 'art, like no other human activity, fosters an immunity in the spectators from the contagion of example'. Art is more dangerous than we usually allow. This is still not an argument for censorship, because (Burke again) 'It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little.' To censor, Burke implies, is to empower.

I hope that I have not too badly travestied the essay in this brief account. Its relevance to war poetry (and, for that matter, all artistic representations of war) is profound. Think of the de rigueur teaching of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' in hushed tones to sombre teens. We need to acknowledge, as Owen himself acknowledged, that war can be (among other things) exhilarating, that we take pleasure in its portrayal, that the successful transformation of atrocity into art is necessarily delightful. Until we recognise the ambiguous motivations of a sympathy which is always spectatorial, we fail to appreciate the war poets' daring, and the reasons for our own attraction to it. The work of art, Bromwich tells us, 'matters because it brings its audience close to a scene of risk.'