Children and War

An international conference titled 'Children and War' will be held in Salzburg from 30 September to 2 October 2010. The conference is organised by the University of Salzburg and the University of Wolverhampton. The deadline for papers is 31 December.

Canadian Poetry from World War I

I missed the publication this summer of a new anthology: Canadian Poetry from World War I, edited by Joel Baetz. By chance I stumbled across it recently, when I was carrying out some amateur research into Robert Service's war poetry.

The recurring theme of Baetz's introduction is that 'Canadians were by and large fervent supporters of the war effort, from its very beginning until its final moments'. A soldier's memoir after the War might talk of a 'nightmare' period of history, but typically his devotion remains intact, and he concludes that the War remains 'the greatest adventure of [his] life among the most glorious men that the world has ever produced.' The poems collected by Baetz seem to support this argument: if there is a Canadian Sassoon or Owen, his work is not represented here. And, sadly, that is a value judgement as well as a political one. Baetz admits that when he is asked, 'But is it good poetry?', his answer is: 'It's always interesting'. The poems are interesting, but I would hesitate to call them good.

The exception is Robert Service. Baetz selects six poems from Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man. They are the best in the book, and they convey the spectrum of Service's responses. One moment he is dutifully celebrating 'the soldier's proudest part': 'He died with the glory of faith in his eyes / And the glory of love in his heart.' The next moment he is writing a traumatised dramatic monologue of a soldier caught on the wire: 'Of the thousands that wheeze and hum / Heedlessly over my head, / Why can't a bullet come, / Pierce to my brain instead...' Pierce to is especially brutal, acknowledging what needs to be pierced even before the bullet reaches the brain to deliver merciful oblivion.

However, the greatest revelation in the anthology is Service's prose, a selection of which Baetz includes in an appendix. An editorial footnote reports that 'Service's Records of a Red Cross Man was a series of weekly correspondent pieces beginning on 11 December 1915 and running until 29 January 1916. Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man was published later that year. The pieces read as documents of Service's experiences as a stretcher-bearer and ambulance driver...'

Service's accounts are, by turns, wry, terrified, courageous and fascinated. An explosion forty yards away leaves the poet staring mesmerised at its 'black snake-head of smoke': 'Then turning round I find I am alone. Like magic every one has vanished.' So Service crawls under his ambulance, and hopes that the man he is waiting to collect --- who is said to be 'dying' --- will hurry up and die so that he can go. It is honest heroism, apparent again later when Service must transport a badly-burned soldier:

The skin of his breast is a blueish color and cracked open in ridges. I am sorry I saw him. After this, when they put the things that once were men into my car I will turn away my head.

The editor of the Toronto Star declined to print the passage. The Ottawa Journal printed it in its entirety, and incurred the wrath of the Chief Censor for doing so.

It may seem to be damning with faint praise to recommend a poetry anthology for its prose, but Baetz's introduction and Service's first-hand accounts make Canadian Poetry from World War I an important book.

Alice Meynell: 'Summer in England, 1914'

Alice Meynell (1847-1922) was a poet, essayist and campaigner for women's suffrage. She converted to Catholicism in her twenties, and that religious faith inspired and sustained her writings for the rest of her life. Her interests ranged from the terrifying wonders of the threshing machine to a passionate denunciation of trousers as 'of all garments the most stupid'. She was a friend and supporter of other poets such as Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore, the latter of whom grew so besotted with her that she was finally obliged to break their friendship.

Meynell's own poetry is underrated. Among her best-known works is 'Summer in England, 1914', which contrasts the idyll of that last innocent summer with the terrible fall into war.

Summer in England, 1914

On London fell a clearer light;
Caressing pencils of the sun
Defined the distances, the white
Houses transfigured one by one,
The 'long, unlovely street' impearled.
O what a sky has walked the world!

Most happy year! And out of town
The hay was prosperous, and the wheat;
The silken harvest climbed the down:
Moon after moon was heavenly-sweet,
Stroking the bread within the sheaves,
Looking 'twixt apples and their leaves.

And while this rose made round her cup,
The armies died convulsed. And when
This chaste young silver sun went up
Softly, a thousand shattered men,
One wet corruption, heaped the plain,
After a league-long throb of pain.

Flower following tender flower; and birds,
And berries; and benignant skies
Made thrive the serried flocks and herds.
---Yonder are men shot through the eyes.
Love, hide thy face
From man's unpardonable race.

Who said 'No man hath greater love than this,
To die to serve his friend'?
So these have loved us all unto the end.
Chide thou no more, O thou unsacrificed!
The soldier dying dies upon a kiss,
The very kiss of Christ.

Focusing on seasonal change from summer to autumn, the poem measures the sudden catastrophe of war by means of a 'rose ma[king] round her cup'. Natural cycles continue, flower following tender flower, while armies die convulsed and men are 'shot through the eyes'.

The final stanza is Meynell's attempt at consolation, a grafting of Christian reward onto the soldiers' death. It opens with a question to which, of course, Meynell knows the answer. The soldiers who are dying for their friends are dying the most Christian of deaths, and as a consequence they receive the 'kiss of Christ' as a image of salvation.

Wilfred Owen may have been thinking of Meynell's poem when he wrote 'Greater Love'. He complained in a letter of 1917 that 'There is a mote in many eyes ... that men are laying down their lives for a friend. I say it is a mote; a distorted view to hold in a general way.'

Robert Service: 'Tri-colour'

Robert Service, the 'Bard of the Yukon', is claimed by three countries: born in Preston, England, he grew up in Scotland, and moved to Canada aged 21. He was the laureate of the Klondike gold rush (although he first visited the area a decade later), making his name with poems like 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew' and 'The Cremation of Sam McGee'.

Less well-known are Service's war poems. During the First World War, he worked for the Canadian Red Cross, and his experiences were recorded in The Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man (1916). The book deserves much more attention: it belongs with the best of Canadian war poetry.

'Tri-colour' (click on this link) is probably voiced for a British or French soldier, as signalled by the red, white and blue of the flowers. (The United States did not join the war until 1917.) It was written in the same year as Canadian John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields'. Both works are dramatic monologues, but whereas McCrae claims to give voice to the dead, Service speaks powerfully for the mad. The Christian consolation at the end is tantalisingly ambiguous. Does the dying soldier hallucinate the vision, or is mercy finally granted?

Andrew Motion and the 'P Word'

To mark Remembrance Day, Andrew Motion has published 'An Equal Voice' --- a 'found poem' about shellshock --- in The Guardian. Today he stands accused of improper behaviour by military historian Ben Shephard:

What Motion actually stitched together were 17 passages from my book A War of Nerves: the ‘voices from a variety of sources’ were not ‘found’ by Motion, but by myself. Of the poem’s eight stanzas, five consist entirely of material from A War of Nerves, very slightly rejigged; in the remaining three stanzas, extracts from the book sit alongside reworked passages from Siegfried Sassoon — the only other source used. Of the 152 lines in 'An Equal Voice', all but 16 are taken directly from A War of Nerves. There is a word for this. It begins with ‘p’ and it isn’t poetry.

Shephard wants Motion condemned for two related issues: breach of copyright, and plagiarism.

There seems to be no dispute that Motion lifted long passages from Shephard's book, that he did not acknowledge the extent of that use, and that he did not request permission. Shephard hits out at double standards: 'Every time I quote a line of poetry in a book, I have to pay.' That isn't quite accurate: one line would fall within 'fair use', although the amount taken by Motion clearly exceeds it. But having acted as both poacher and gamekeeper, I know that it is a painstaking and extremely expensive process to get permission to quote from copyrighted work. Copyright law applies to ex-Poet Laureates as much as to hoi polloi. Even so, I can't see this as an especially egregious fault. Historians and literary scholars (and especially bloggers...) who work with modern materials know how treacherous the terrain of copyright, permissions and fair use is. There is a reason why very little case law exists: no one can afford to go to court over a few lines of poetry.

Potentially much more serious is Shephard's accusation of plagiarism. Motion should not be allowed to get very far with a defence based on whataboutery: what about Shakespeare, etc. And what about the tradition of 'found poetry'? The argument that adding line breaks gives the poet an exemption from copyright laws and academic standards is, I'm afraid, risible. Anyway, as Shephard points out, all the finding was done by him, not by Motion.

Nevertheless, on first publication of 'An Equal Voice' The Guardian made clear (obviously at Motion's prompting) that it is a found poem. Coupled with the epigraph from Shephard, that highlights not only the second-hand nature of Motion's words but also his likely source. The poem's acknowledgements are not at all satisfactory, and they should have been handled much more adroitly in order to avoid just this kind of controversy. There is, though, enough evidence to suggest that the omission was careless, high-handed, but not intentionally deceitful.

The matter ought to have been sensibly resolved with a private apology to Ben Shephard (who has been clearly wronged), a retrospective payment of permissions fees, and an undertaking that proper acknowledgement will be made in any subsequent reprinting of the poem. Instead, we have an unseemly public row leading up to Remembrance Day.

Update:
Read George Simmers's criticism of 'Sir Andrew' [Aguecheek?]'s poem here.

Laurence Binyon: 'For the Fallen'

As Remembrance Day approaches, we are likely to encounter a familiar stanza from a poet whose works are otherwise almost entirely forgotten: Laurence Binyon. Binyon was a brilliant man: Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum; scholar of William Blake and of Oriental Art; a Red Cross volunteer at the Western Front; Norton Professor at Harvard in the early 30s; friend of Ezra Pound, Walter Sickert, Edmund Dulac and countless others.

Binyon was not always careful of his acquaintances' reputations. During the British Library’s move to St Pancras in 1995, a box of papers was discovered which had once belonged to him. It contained six letters from Rosenberg to Binyon and twenty-eight more from Rosenberg to another poet, Gordon Bottomley, as well as alternative versions of some of Rosenberg’s best-known poems and several memoirs of Rosenberg collected by Binyon after the war. Having made the initial effort to preserve these markers of Rosenberg's achievement, he had then lost or forgotten about them. Nevertheless, in the early 1920s Binyon did write a fifty-page tribute to Rosenberg, praising in particular the younger poet's 'ardent toil' and 'continual self-criticism'.

Geoffrey Hill has called Binyon's 'For the Fallen' 'perhaps the most widely known and widely quoted poem of the Great War'. Its challengers would presumably be Brooke's 'The Soldier' and Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'. Taken as a whole, 'For the Fallen' is less known than any of those, but its fourth stanza is proclaimed at Remembrance Day events worldwide.

For the Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in the labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

It is easy to see why that fourth stanza, alone, should have been rescued from oblivion. It constitutes the turning-point, the moment when the poem's argument for consolation emerges: the dead enjoy an eternal youth, immortalised in the memory of the living and in other more permanent ways. They are 'As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust'. Their everlastingness exists outside memory, in a form of stellification which harks back to a common motif in Greek myth.

For formal reasons as well, that fourth stanza is especially effective. Its foreshortened final line, 'We will remember them', states without embellishment. It expresses a profound recognition which would only be cheapened by rhetorical flourish. But most of all, the stanza seems sonorous because of its echo of Enobarbus's compliment to Cleopatra: 'Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety'. It may seem a long stretch from Cleopatra's beauty to the fallen youth of the First World War, but a similar principle applies: each achieves a perfection immune to the ravages of time.

Siegfried Sassoon's Papers

George Simmers today reports on the happy fact that Siegfried Sassoon's papers have been saved for the nation. In the process, he reserves some well-aimed barbs for Andrew Motion (whose grasp of Great War history is not entirely secure) and Michael Morpurgo (who is credited by George with a love of 'grand simplicities'). Morpurgo's latest meanderings on the 'futility' of the War can be found here.

I have blogged previously that the University of Exeter holds twenty letters from Sassoon to Charles Causley. I am keen to trace the other side of the correspondence: letters from Causley to Sassoon. They do not seem to be among the papers bought by Cambridge, or any of the other significant Sassoon archives. If you know of their whereabouts, please get in touch.

Virtual Trenches

Those ingenious people at the First World War Poetry Digital Archive have created a virtual 'tour' of the First World War battlefields, which you can sample by clicking the video above. You can also experience the site by visiting Second Life here.

This is their press release:

With Armistice Day fast approaching a JISC project team has taken an unusual approach to ensuring that people continue to learn about the First World War.

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University have collaborated on an exciting new project in the 3D virtual world Second Life to simulate areas of the Western Front 1914-18. The team believes this is the first time anything of its type has been done on Second Life.

This project, which is funded by JISC, has arranged a range of digitised archival materials like poetry manuscripts, letters and diaries from the major poets of the First World War including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Vera Brittain, along with contextual primary source materials. These materials have been supplemented with new interpretative content and a spectrum of interactive tools and tutorials, streaming video and audio effects.

The artefacts have been drawn from the highly successful First World War Poetry Digital Archive1, launched in 2009 to mark the 90th anniversary of the end of the war. By placing them in an online virtual model the project aims to make the collection more useful and engaging to a range of different user groups across UK education sectors, research communities and the heritage industry.

Ben Showers, digitisation programme officer at JISC, said: “The First World War Digital Poetry Archive is constantly pushing the boundaries of what it means to be an academic archive, and now users are able to interact with the collections and materials. JISC funding for this additional virtual environment means students, researchers and everyone interested in this material can collaborate and become immersed in the world of the Western Front to experience the immediate context of these manuscripts and poems like never before.”

Visitors to the virtual trenches are given a unique immersive experience where they can explore a training camp, dressing station, a trench network and No Man’s Land. The terrain is waterlogged and difficult to navigate, rife with rats and littered with poppies. Moving nearer to the front line the clamour of shell blasts and artillery fire becomes louder and louder.

Dr Stuart Lee, lecturer in English at Oxford University, said: “Attempting to form the context of a particular piece of literature is a key critical approach in the discipline, which normally involves studying secondary material, or in rare case, site visits. By piloting the use of Second Life, the First World War Poetry Archive is approaching this in an innovative way. More importantly it is showing how new technologies (virtual worlds) can be utilised to provide more interesting access to key research and teaching resources.”

As guests explore the simulation, they can listen to the voices of veterans recounting their experiences of the war, watch original film footage from the time, and learn about life on the Western Front. Within this context they can encounter some of the most powerful poetry in English literature by handling the original manuscripts, turning the pages of the poet’s war diaries and letters, and listening to readings.

At the end the visitor is teleported out of the trenches to a teaching area. Here they are asked to consider the memory of the war, and to confront their own prejudices and stereotypes - was the war really all about trenches, mud, and rats, or are their other aspects to it that we now need to consider? Should it only be remembered as mass slaughter, a gross act of futility, or more a collective act of unparalleled heroism that ended ultimately in a victory for Britain and its allies?

Kate Lindsay, project manager, said: “Virtual worlds create opportunities to do things that are impossible in real museums. By simulating parts of the Western Front, we can embed an entire exhibition's worth of content within in the space. This can be further enhanced by placing digital versions of real archival materials and narratives along the paths that visitors take. The result is an immersive and personal experience. It's not 'real' but it does offer possibilities for understanding a part of history that is now beyond human memory."