Hedd Wyn and Francis Ledwidge

On this day in 1917, Hedd Wyn (right) and Francis Ledwidge were killed just a few miles apart at Passchendaele.

Hedd Wyn had joined that most brilliantly poetic of regiments, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, only the previous month, but there is no evidence that he ever met his comrades David Jones, Siegfried Sassoon or Robert Graves. Unlike them, he wrote his poetry in Welsh. (Unlike them, a cynic may be tempted to add, he was Welsh.) Having finished second at the National Eisteddfod in 1916, he was posthumously elected Bard the following year for his entry 'Yr Arwr' ('The Hero'). I am the first to admit that my Welsh is a little rusty, so I cannot speak for the accuracy of these translations of some of Hedd Wyn's poetry: 'Y Blotyn Du' ('The Black Spot') and 'Rhyfel' ('War').

Francis Ledwidge was an Irish Nationalist and passionate supporter of Home Rule. He enlisted because he considered that Ireland's interests were better served by British victory, but the Easter Rising of 1916 put paid to that belief, and Ledwidge began to cause problems for the British: having outstayed home leave, he was court-martialled and demoted, yet he returned to France and served with great merit in 1917. I wish that I liked his poetry better: much of it is a dreamy sub-Yeatsian mood-music. At its best, as here in 'After Court Martial', it manages to elude Ledwidge's all-too-familar 'dream companions', at least briefly.

After Court Martial

My mind is not my mind, therefore
I take no heed of what men say,
I have lived ten thousand years before
God cursed the town of Nineveh.

The present is a dream I see
Of horror and loud sufferings,
At dawn a bird will waken me
Unto my place among the kings.

And though men called me a vile name,
And all my dream companions gone,
'Tis I the soldier bears the shame,
Not I the king of Babylon.

Sassoon so soon

With admirable speed, Cambridge University has released the film of the Siegfried Sassoon panel discussion, which took place at the University Library on 20 July. Speakers, in order of appearance, are Jon Stallworthy, Max Egremont, Santanu Das, and 'blogographer' Tim Kendall. It can be viewed here.

The exhibition of Sassoon's papers is open until 23 December, and is highly recommended.

Cynthia Wachtell: War No More

Cynthia Wachtell's War No More comes with a handily descriptive subtitle: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature 1861-1914. Wachtell traces that impulse through many of the major American writers of the period: Melville, Whitman, Twain, William James, Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, etc. The Civil War, and the ways in which it is subsequently remembered, take up most of the book, although Wachtell gradually looks ahead to the technology-driven apocalypse of the First World War. She is especially effective at describing the power of weaponry during the period and its increasing ability to mutilate and destroy the human body. The extent to which the poetry of 1914-18 was foreshadowed by writings from and about the American Civil War is conspicuous throughout.

My chief criticism of what is otherwise a valuable and highly recommended book is that Wachtell sometimes misjudges her audience: she says what she is going to say, says it, then says what she has said, running through this pattern several times in each chapter. Even so, this is a noble fault, which at least makes the argument easy to follow. Part of her case is that the anti-war impulse, during the Civil War, is self-censoring. Whitman, for example, saves his most horrific and sceptical descriptions of the Civil War for notebooks and poem drafts, and does not suffer them into print. And Melville, more outspoken than Whitman, is largely ignored (according to Wachtell) because of the unpopularity of his views.

Short chapters on such huge authors cannot go far, which is why Wachtell is most impressive when writing about a lesser-known figure like John William De Forest, who served in the Civil War, and regretted not having taken part in 'one of the greater battles, such as Gettysburg or Chickamauga', but who wrote with unusual candour about the experience of combat. His novel of 1867, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, loudly broadcasts its author's own loyalties even through its title, but Wachtell's account and sensitive quotations suggest that it amounts to more than a victor's smugness. For example, a soldier is shot while reading a newspaper: 'The ball had struck him under the chin, traversed the neck, and cut the spinal column where it joins the brain, making a fearful hole through which the blood had already soaked his great-coat.'

Wachtell expertly demonstrates how the great authors expose the pro-war platitudes of the age. Given that her study stops at 1914, she has less need to consider the possibility of anti-war platitudes. Her conclusion acknowledges a general shift in the American consciousness:

As a nation of readers, we have gone from idolizing the valiant hero to idolizing the alienated antihero. We have gone from being a nation of romantics to a nation of skeptics. Even so, wars continue to be fought.

While puzzling over this paradox, Wachtell seems to imply that Americans today are ethically better and more enlightened (at least in respect of attitudes to war) than their 19th-century predecessors. Yet 'Americans continue, all too frequently, to engage in war'. Why should a democratic nation consistently frustrate --- and have the power to frustrate --- the will of its people? Could it be that, for all our fine rhetoric and our hand-wringing artworks, we share our humanity with our ancestors? Homer represented the pity of war and the glory of war as equal and mutually-reliant truths. There may be times, such as during the Civil War, when one of those truths needs to be emphasised in order to address an existing imbalance in public discourse. But I am not persuaded that anti-war writers are wiser than Homer.

Sassoon Exhibition: Dream Voices

It was a great pleasure to speak alongside Max Egremont, Santanu Das and Jon Stallworthy last night at an event in Cambridge celebrating the launch of the new Siegfried Sassoon exhibition. It runs until 23 December at the University Library, and is well worth a visit. In case you can't make it, the next best thing is to visit the website which shows off the exhibits effectively. There is also the archivists' blog, the BBC's audio slideshow, and an account of the launch party.

I met some fascinating people, including several who had known Sassoon, two of Edmund Blunden's daughters, and a Vietnam War veteran who insisted that Sassoon's 'The Kiss' has nothing to do with sex. 'Sometimes, Sigmund', he told me, 'a cigar is just a cigar'. But, I protested, the poem is called 'The Kiss'! A kiss is just a kiss, he might have countered, although in the light of the poem's sadistic fantasy, a still more appropriate musical allusion would have been to the kiss of Tosca.

Fredegond Shove: 'The Farmer, 1917'

A number of Great War poets prove that it is possible to write one short masterpiece and nothing else of any note. In the case of Patrick Shaw Stewart and Julian Grenfell, their early deaths allow speculation that they might have written more, had they lived. That excuse will hardly serve for Laurence Binyon: all that survives of his countless collections of verse is one stanza from one poem. John McCrae has fared only fractionally better: two of his stanzas are known and loved. These canonical oddities cannot be ignored by anthologists --- Jon Silkin even pays Grenfell the reluctant compliment of including him under protest --- and yet there is no possibility of talking about poetic development or the peculiarities of a unique voice. The poems resist all the usual blandishments of literary criticism.

Fredegond Shove (1889-1949), pictured right, does not deserve to be elevated even to these not-especially-exalted heights. If her work is encountered at all, it is probably via Ralph Vaughan Williams's song cycle, 'Four Poems by Fredegond Shove'. (As luck would have it, Shove was the niece of Vaughan Williams's first wife.) Fredegond Shove provides a case-study in how poems can linger at the edge of the canon, handed down from anthologist to anthologist, long after the poet herself has been forgotten.

Shove was well-connected. After her father's death, her mother married Charles Darwin's son, Francis, and she herself married the anti-Keynesian economist, Gerald Shove. A sense of her social milieu comes from the fact that the photograph above was taken by Ottoline Morrell, some of whose other images of the Shoves can be found here. Sir Edward Marsh included four poems by Shove in the 1918-19 edition of Georgian Poetry. Then, her work disappeared, almost. One poem turned up in Ian Parsons' Men Who March Away, and that same poem was reprinted by George Walter in his Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Anthologists read anthologists. Perhaps Walter agreed that it is the only poem by Shove worth saving. Perhaps, given the paucity of good women poets writing about the war, and given, too, the unspoken politics of anthologising, editors of First World War poetry are especially keen to accommodate the works of women poets.

I had better find out for myself, by reading all Shove's work, before my own anthology of Great War poetry is submitted to Oxford.

Here is the poem, anthologised as 'The Farmer' by Parsons and 'The Farmer, 1917' by Walter. Please post below your comments on its worth. For the record, it seems very ordinary to me.

The Farmer, 1917

I see a farmer walking by himself
In the ploughed field, returning like the day
To his dark nest. The plovers circle round
In the gray sky; the blackbird calls; the thrush
Still sings---but all the rest have gone to sleep.
I see the farmer coming up the field,
Where the new corn is sown, but not yet sprung;
He seems to be the only man alive
And thinking through the twilight of this world.
I know that there is war behind those hills,
And I surmise, but cannot see the dead,
And cannot see the living in their midst---
So awfully and madly knit with death.
I cannot feel, but know that there is war,
And has been now for three eternal years,
Behind the subtle cinctures of those hills.
I see the farmer coming up the field,
And as I look, imagination lifts
The sullen veil of alternating cloud,
And I am stunned by what I see behind
His solemn and uncompromising form:
Wide hosts of men who once could walk like him
In freedom, quite alone with night and day,
Uncounted shapes of living flesh and bone,
Worn dull, quenched dry, gone blind and sick, with war;
And they are him and he is one with them;
They see him as he travels up the field.
O God, how lonely freedom seems to-day!
O single farmer walking through the world,
They bless the seed in you that earth shall reap,
When they, their countless lives, and all their thoughts,
Lie scattered by the storm: when peace shall come
With stillness, and long shivers, after death.

Rudyard Kipling: 'A Death-Bed'

When I blogged about Swinburne's Boer War poem, 'Transvaal', I noted that it broke down into incoherence, as if unable to formalise into art its visceral hatred. The record seems to show that it is harder to write an effective poem of hatred than of love. War poetry may have more reason to express hatred than other kinds of verse, but even here, an example such as Swinburne's stands out as (at best) eccentric and at worst morally repugnant.

Daniel Karlin has made a strong case for Robert Browning as a 'good hater', but after Shakespeare the most brilliant explorer of hatred in all its depths and shades must be Rudyard Kipling. Stories like 'Letting in the Jungle', 'Red Dog' and 'Mary Postgate' are terrifying in the pure intensity of their emotion. Kipling provides no refuge for the sentimental reader.

Hatred is often a possibility in Kipling's verse, but is less frequently realised except when he is thinking about the Hun (a term which he himself popularised). He stated in 1915 that the world was divided into 'human beings and Germans'. His poem 'Justice' from 1918 comes very close to describing the German nation as 'Evil Incarnate', and calls for a 'reckoning' whereby, 'till the end of time, / Their remnant shall recall / Their fathers' old, confederate crime / Availed them not at all.' Even so, this seems mild compared with 'A Death-Bed', written that same year in response to rumours that the Kaiser was suffering from throat cancer. The detail with which Kipling describes the final stages of the disease, and juxtaposes the Kaiser's death with the deaths for which Kipling held him personally responsible, is done with such authorial relish that I can think of no more vicious poem. Swinburne's hatred seemed ridiculous and self-defeating; Kipling's has an irresistible power.

A Death-Bed

'This is the State above the Law.

   The State exists for the State alone.'

[This is a gland at the back of the jaw,

   And an answering lump by the collarbone.]

Some die shouting in gas or fire;

   Some die silent, by shell and shot.

Some die desperate, caught on the wire;

   Some die suddenly. This will not.

'Regis suprema voluntas lex'

   [It will follow the regular course of --- throats.]

Some die pinned by the broken decks,

   Some die sobbing between the boats.

Some die eloquent, pressed to death

   By the sliding trench as their friends can hear.

Some die wholly in half a breath,

   Some --- give trouble for half a year.

'There is neither Evil nor Good in life

   Except as the needs of the State ordain.'

[Since it is rather too late for the knife,

   All we can do is mask the pain.]

Some die saintly in faith and hope ---

   One died thus in a prison-yard ---

Some die broken by rape or the rope;

   Some die easily. This dies hard.

'I will dash to pieces who bar my way.

   Woe to the traitor! Woe to the weak!'

[Let him write what he wishes to say.

   It tires him out if he tries to speak.]

Some die quietly. Some abound

   In loud self-pity. Others spread

Bad morale through the cots around...

   This is a type that is better dead.

'The war was forced on me by my foes.

   All that I sought was the right to live.'

[Don't be afraid of a triple dose;

   The pain will neutralize half we give.

Here are the needles. See that he dies

   While the effects of the drug endure...

What is the question he asks with his eyes? ---

   Yes, All-Highest, to God, be sure.]

['Regis suprema voluntas lex' --- the King's will is the supreme law. ]

Miles Jebb: Patrick Shaw Stewart, An Edwardian Meteor

Patrick Shaw Stewart was the author of one of the finest lyrics of the First World War, and of no other poetry of note. The case for a full dress biography does not, therefore, seem compelling. Yet at 243 pages, Miles Jebb's account justifies its detail. This is the study of a remarkable man --- remarkable on his own merits, and remarkable for moving in social circles which included so many of the great men and women of the day. Shaw Stewart listed among friends and acquaintances the Asquiths, Winston Churchill, Rupert Brooke, Denis Browne, the Grenfell brothers, Ronald Knox, and Duff Cooper, and his love affair with the great beauty of the age, Lady Diana Manners, would almost certainly have been doomed even had he survived the War.

Jebb makes clear the violent contradictions in Shaw Stewart's personality. (I take Jebb's dropping of the hyphen in Shaw Stewart's name as definitive.) Here was a genius, quite capable of proving himself the greatest classicist of his generation. Yet he found time to cram for exams in the midst of a social merry-go-around which first exhausts and then begins to bore the reader. Educated at Eton and Oxford, and destined for untold riches and power at Barings Bank, Shaw Stewart moved amidst a privileged elite. In his relations with women, with the middle-classes (whom he despised and affected to ignore), and especially with Jews, he did not seem admirable. Writing about an election at All Souls, he reported that 'by the strenuous efforts of me and one or two others, the election of a Polish Jew from Balliol, much the strongest candidate really, was prevented.'

For this corrupt coterie, as they liked to call themselves, the arrival of the War proved especially tragic. Shaw Stewart was the last of his circle of friends to die, having survived Gallipoli against all odds as his comrades were killed by the dozen. Commenting on his final period of leave, Manners found his appearance 'macabre' and 'weighted with the dread of war and blackened by the deaths of his dearest friends'. He was killed at the Western Front near Cambrai on 30 December 1917. Ten years earlier he had spoken in favour of war: 'to the volunteer it is the opportunity for the most splendid self-sacrifice that it commonly falls to the lot of mankind to make... It is the possibility of war... that fosters the national spirit, the spirit of independence, the spirit of competition which is the animant spirit of the human race.'

Miles Jebb has done a great service by bringing Shaw Stewart and his group to life. My only regret is that he spends so little time on Shaw Stewart's masterpiece, 'I saw a man this morning', and his few references to it seem ambivalent: he describes it as 'rigidly in the style' of Housman's A Shropshire Lad. Rigidly? For a thorough and more appreciative treatment of that poem, and (inter alia) evidence of Shaw Stewart's compendious knowledge of salacious passages in classical texts, the study to consult is Elizabeth Vandiver's superb Stand in the Trench, Achilles.

Update: there is a very useful new website dedicated to the biography and to Shaw Stewart here.

Beat! Beat! Drums!

Walt Whitman I admire this side idolatry, so as I finish my study of Robert Frost I am especially interested in Frost's uneasy, and at times openly hostile, relationship to Whitman's legacy. In formal terms, their poetry could not be more unlike. Whitman sought a new and democratic poetry suited to what he considered the greatest poem of all: the United States itself. European models would not do:

Poetry is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl... The truest and greatest poetry... can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming meter.

The United States was too big for the poetry of courts and patronage to survive. An expansive poetry was required, free from the shackles of cramped anti-democratic traditions, and Whitman set about creating it.

Frost had a similar ambition to make a national poetry, but in what was quite consciously a swerve away from Whitman, he developed a poetics which grew out of foreign models: 'When a man sets out consciously to tear up forms and rhythms and measures, then he is not interested in giving you poetry. He just wants to perform, he wants to show you his tricks.' In an unpublished lecture given in the last decade of his life, Frost explained that Whitman had 'decided to go entirely for scope, gave up art'. The allusion to Shakespeare's sonnet 29 --- 'Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope' --- is fitting not only given Frost's envy of Whitman, but because Shakespeare is the third in this particularly difficult relationship.

Today, Whitman's reputation in the UK is absurdly low. He has not travelled well, which is strange considering that for many decades the most important of his disciples were English poets. Kipling antagonised his teachers at Westward Ho! by claiming the (still sulphurous) Whitman as his favourite poet. 'I have written a few war poems', Isaac Rosenberg told Joseph Leftwich three months before he died, 'but when I think of Drum Taps mine are absurd'. The extent of Gurney's obsession is still not widely known because so much remains unpublished, but Gurney set Whitman's poems to music, borrowed lines, rewrote (and, he thought, improved) whole poems by Whitman, and felt entitled to write about 'Mannahatta' despite having only encountered it through Whitman's verse. It may have been easier for these English writers to praise Whitman because, unlike Frost, they did not feel themselves in competition with him.

Rosenberg did, admittedly, express some reservations about Whitman, complaining that 'his diction is so diffused'. Yet he considered that with 'Beat, drums, beat' (he meant 'Beat! Beat! Drums!'), Whitman had 'said the noblest thing on war'. I have blogged previously about Whitman and the American Civil War. 'Beat! Beat! Drums!' brings together two equal truths: that war is exhilarating, and that it is 'terrible'. The poem makes a terrific noise in its war-excitement, as Whitman insists that all activity not relating to the War must cease, and ploughshares must be converted to swords once again. However, gradually and unexpectedly the reader is brought to face the cost of that incessant rhythmical pulse. Whitman leaves the two irreconcilable truths to exist in uneasy balance:

Beat! Beat! Drums!

Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows---through doors---burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying;
Leave not the bridegroom quiet---no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums---so shrill you bugles blow.

Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities---over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,
No bargainers' bargains by day---no brokers or speculators---would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums---you bugles wilder blow.

Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley---stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid---mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums---so loud you bugles blow.

Sassoonery

On 21 July, an exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Siegfried Sassoon will open in Cambridge at the University Library. This will mark the success of the university's campaign to save Sassoon's papers for the nation.

The previous day, I will be speaking with Max Egremont, Santanu Das and Jon Stallworthy in Cambridge on all matters Sassoonian. Details to follow.

The archivists have started a lively blog (yes, really!) which describes their work on the papers and their preparations for the exhibition's opening.