tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24996612741635517932024-03-13T02:31:06.554+00:00War PoetryTim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.comBlogger209125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-85222076541289764642014-03-28T11:15:00.002+00:002014-03-28T11:15:23.326+00:00BBC Documentary on Ivor Gurney<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bwBhGQlX8kA/UzVXu_vWXQI/AAAAAAAABAo/u8iYLQ_gQQQ/s1600/Gurney+tx.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bwBhGQlX8kA/UzVXu_vWXQI/AAAAAAAABAo/u8iYLQ_gQQQ/s1600/Gurney+tx.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03zq4cb">My documentary on Ivor Gurney</a>, directed by <a href="http://gb.viadeo.com/en/profile/clive.flowers">Clive Flowers</a>, will be broadcast this Sunday, 30 March, at 9pm on BBC4. <br />
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Several years ago, a number of scholars specialising in the First World War were invited to a jointly-organised <a href="http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Pages/Home.aspx">AHRC</a>/BBC event in London. We discussed our work, and gave our views on how the BBC might mark the forthcoming centenary. There I met an executive producer, Mike Poole, who, as luck would have it, had always wanted to commission a programme about Gurney. So he approached Clive, making him the gift of a rather startled academic with no previous TV experience as presenter. <br />
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The filming process, although exhausting, was an absolute joy. Locations included the Somme (where Gurney was shot), Passchendaele (gassed), the Royal College of Music, and some of the hills around Gloucester which inspired Gurney's greatest poetry. Thanks to <a href="http://filmryan.com/">Ryan</a>'s stunning camerawork, it is easy to appreciate why Gurney loved these landscapes. We were also lucky to interview such eloquent experts, my biggest regret being that, for an hour-long documentary, so much superb material ended up on the cutting-room floor. <br />
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Lost in the no-place of the asylum for the last 15 years of his life, Gurney complained constantly that he had not received the 'honour' that was due to him. Wishing for death, he felt forgotten, betrayed, exiled from his native Gloucestershire and condemned to lingering torture. I thought about that a great deal as I was helping to make this documentary. The programme is intended as some small and belated recompense, a homage to an extraordinary genius who remains underappreciated even today. Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-56312675650779697882014-02-20T15:46:00.001+00:002014-02-20T15:51:41.496+00:00Conference: British Poetry of the First World War, 5-7 September 2014, Wadham College, Oxford<div class="separator" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;">
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The <a href="http://englishassociation.ac.uk/conference/programme-2/">programme</a> is now confirmed for the conference on British Poetry of the First World War, to be held at <a href="http://www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/">Wadham College, Oxford</a>, on 5-7 September 2014. <br />
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There will be 17 sessions and over 60 speakers, including keynotes by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_Longley">Edna Longley</a> and <a href="http://history.yale.edu/people/jay-winter">Jay Winter</a>. <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jon-stallworthy">Jon Stallworthy</a>, the conference patron, will also be speaking. Subjects range from discussions of individual poets such as Owen and Sassoon to wider considerations of the canonisation of war poetry, the role of women, the teaching of war poetry in schools, and the influence of war poets on subsequent writers.<br />
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On Friday night, 5 September, acclaimed baritone <a href="http://www.opera-britannia.com/index.php?%20option=com_content&view=article&id=69:interview-roderick-williams&catid=15&Itemid=14">Roderick Williams</a> will be accompanied by a leading young pianist, <a href="http://www.askonasholt.co.uk/artists/accompanists/gary-matthewman">Gary Matthewman</a>, to perform war-related music by Ireland, Finzi, Vaughan Williams, Gurney and others. The next evening, the conference dinner will take place in Wadham College Hall. <br />
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There is a dedicated conference website <a href="http://englishassociation.ac.uk/conference">here</a>, and any <a href="http://englishassociation.ac.uk/conference/book-now/">bookings</a> before 1 March are entitled to an Early Bird discount. Overnight accommodation at Wadham College is now bookable at special conference rates. Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-14268845205570151812014-01-21T11:22:00.001+00:002014-01-21T11:30:59.806+00:00Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, and Homer<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have blogged separately about </span><a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/rupert-brooke-peace.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rupert Brooke</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and </span><a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/julian-grenfell-into-battle.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Julian Grenfell</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">. They were the earliest fatalities of all the War's significant poets, and despite the immense popularity of their work for many decades, in recent times their reputations have suffered because they discomfort us with truths about war which we would rather not acknowledge. Brooke, in particular, has become a byword for naivety, his example counterblasted by Owen's and Sassoon's bitter voices of experience. If Brooke had lived longer, the argument goes, he would have learnt better. <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Minds-War-Poetry-Experience-First/dp/0952896907">The recent anthologist</a> who condemns Brooke's 'life-diminishing ideas' and 'sick philosophy' articulates opinions which are regularly heard in schoolrooms and beyond. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Far from being a foolish innocent, Brooke in 1914 knew more about war than almost any of his contemporaries. Granted a commission in the Royal Naval Division---a new amphibious unit of Winston Churchill's devising---he had been helpless at the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Antwerp_(1914)"><span style="font-family: inherit;">siege and fall of Antwerp</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> as what he later called 'one of the greatest crimes in history' played out: 'Hundreds of thousands of refugees, their goods on barrows and hand-carts and perambulators and wagons... the old men mostly weeping, the women with hard drawn faces... That's what Belgium is now: the country where three civilians have been killed to every one soldier.' Brooke understood the nature of modern conflict, foreseeing the 'incessant mechanical slaughter'. Nevertheless, appalling as it was, the sacrifice must be made, not only to protect England from a similar fate, but for compelling humanitarian reasons: 'I've seen the half million refugees in the night'. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Back in England, Brooke wrote the five sonnets of '1914' as a 'rallying cry' to a nation which didn't yet realise what 'sacrifices --- active or passive' would be required of its citizens. The Dean of St Paul's read the last of these (</span><a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15695"><span style="font-family: inherit;">'The Soldier'</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">) from the pulpit on Easter Sunday, 4 April 1915. Less than three weeks later, on St. George's Day, Brooke was dead, having succumbed to septicaemia following a mosquito bite. Winston Churchill, in his obituary for Brooke published on 26 April, celebrated a man who 'was all that one could wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable'. The apotheosis was complete: tens of thousands of copies of Brooke's poetry were sold every year until well into the 1960s, and every subsequent soldier-poet was obliged to wrestle with Brooke's legacy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The first to do so was Julian Grenfell. Grenfell was Eton and Oxford, Brooke Rugby and Cambridge; Grenfell was a hearty in extremis (boxing, hunting), Brooke an aesthete. Yet the two men had friends in common, such as </span><a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/miles-jebb-patrick-shaw-stewart.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Patrick Shaw Stewart</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, and Grenfell would soon have known Brooke's fate. On 29 April 1915, six days after Brooke's death, Grenfell wrote his most famous poem, <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/julian-grenfell-into-battle.html">'Into Battle'</a>. Its opening stanza makes extraordinary claims:</span><br />
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The naked earth is warm with spring,<br />
And with green grass and bursting trees<br />
Leans to the sun's kiss glorying,<br />
And quivers in the loving breeze;<br />
And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,<br />
And a striving evermore for these;<br />
And he is dead who will not fight;<br />
And who dies fighting has increase. <br />
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What starts like a gorgeous invocation of spring's renewal becomes suddenly strange and disturbing. Readers carried along by rhyme and anaphora ('And... And... And... And... And...') will find themselves assenting to statements which are, at best, controversial: 'And he is dead who will not fight; / And who dies fighting has increase.' <a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199542741.do">Elizabeth Vandiver</a>, the poem's most perceptive critic, points out that Grenfell's debt is not to Christian but to classical tradition, especially to Homer's <em>Iliad </em>with its belief that the reputational glory gained through a brave death in battle provides 'increase'. As a demonstration, Vandiver quotes Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus in<em> Iliad</em> 12: 'My dear friend, if the two of us could flee this war and be forever ageless and immortal, I would not fight on among the foremost warriors nor would I send you into the battle that brings a man glory. But as it is, since thousands of death spirits crowd upon us, which no mortal can flee nor ward off, let us go; either we will yield glory to another, or someone will yield it to us.'<br />
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Without challenging Vandiver's belief in the poem's Homeric perspective, it is possible to see that, in the days after Brooke's death, Grenfell was also influenced by something closer to hand: Brooke's '1914'. The line 'And he is dead who will not fight' --- a concise expression of the paradox that we are only truly alive when we dare to risk our lives --- comes close to Brooke's opening sonnet, <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/rupert-brooke-peace.html">'Peace'</a>, with its dismissal of those who will not fight as 'sick hearts that honour could not move, / And half-men'. As for Sarpedon's <span style="font-family: inherit;">speech, it is mediated through the octave of Brooke's third sonnet, 'The Dead':</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Blow
out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s none of these so lonely and poor
of old,</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, dying, had made us rarer gifts than
gold.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;">These
laid the world away; poured out the red</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;">Sweet
wine of youth; gave up the years to be</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of work and joy, and that </span><span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;">unhoped</span><span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;"> serene,</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That men call age; and those who would
have been,</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: black; language: en-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-color-index: 1; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-font-kerning: 12.0pt; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-style-textfill-type: solid;">Their
sons, they gave, their immortality.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Sarpedon tells Glaucus that they</span> may as well sacrifice themselves, as one day they will die anyway; if they could achieve immortality by fleeing the battle, they should do so. Brooke makes the sacrifice of the War's early victims more complete. These men outdo even Homeric heroes. In Grenfell's terms, they 'ha[ve] increase', being 'rich'. At the same time, they (unlike Sarpedon) have been prepared to sacrifice their 'immortality'; that is, they give those never-to-be-conceived 'sons' when they give themselves. This is the ultimate sacrifice, all the richer for losing far more than mere life. Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-67512440871945559492013-11-04T19:26:00.001+00:002013-11-05T09:21:01.043+00:00F. W. Harvey, POW Poet<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ypmJ6LloRC4/UnftXqBRH3I/AAAAAAAAA7Q/PkiBfkrbFtI/s1600/FWHarvey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ypmJ6LloRC4/UnftXqBRH3I/AAAAAAAAA7Q/PkiBfkrbFtI/s320/FWHarvey.jpg" width="220" /></a>Thanks to the work of my PhD student, Grant Repshire, the papers of <a href="http://www.fwharveysociety.co.uk/">F. W. Harvey</a> will be made available to the public later this month at the <a href="http://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives/article/107703/Archives-Homepage">Gloucestershire Archives</a>. Grant's project is the result of a collaboration between the University of Exeter, the Archives, and the <a href="http://www.fwharveysociety.co.uk/">F. W. Harvey Society</a> and Estate. As well as curating and cataloguing the collection, Grant is preparing a full doctoral thesis in the form of a new biography. Harvey's papers include <a href="http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/research/title_331451_en.html">an unpublished novel</a> (due to appear from the History Press in 2014), poetry notebooks, scrapbooks, and correspondence. Among the treasures are many previously unseen letters from Harvey's close friend, <a href="http://ivorgurney.org.uk/biography.htm">Ivor Gurney</a>.
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Harvey survived the War, having been captured in 1916 during a daring solo trench raid. As a POW, he was moved from camp to camp, and later wrote about his experiences in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Comrades-Captivity-F-W-Harvey/dp/1177164582">Comrades in Captivity</a></em>. There were, of course, the obligatory escape attempts, including a leap from a moving train which resulted in swift recapture. There was also the opportunity to write poems: the various commandants were civilised enough to allow Harvey to send home his work, where it was published to great acclaim. Many of those POW poems are collected <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/F-W-Harvey-Selected-Poems/dp/0946252831/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383592232&sr=1-8&keywords=Harvey+selected+poems">in this edition</a>, and one or two and can be found online <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/frederick-william-fw-harvey/poems/">here</a>. <br />
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The wonders of social technology mean that you can now follow F. W. Harvey on Twitter (@FWHarvey), where he will tell you all about his incarceration, his inspirational role in the first trench newspaper (which, contrary to received opinion, was not <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipers_Times">The Wipers Times</a></em>), his love of cricket, and much else besides. </div>
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P.S. Grant emails to tell me that Harvey's <em>Gloucestershire Friends: Poems from a German Prison Camp</em> can be read online <a href="https://archive.org/details/gloucestershiref00harv">here</a>. </div>
Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-71303718123756203412013-10-26T07:39:00.001+01:002013-10-26T07:39:46.819+01:00On Seamus Heaney's Last Poem<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The Guardian is today running an article on <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/25/seamus-heaney-last-poem-published">'Seamus Heaney's last poem'</a>. Whether 'In a Field' can sustain that billing, the small print acknowledges, we don't yet know for sure: 'the papers he left behind are yet to be fully examined'. So, for 'last' read 'latest'. Nevertheless, if even <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10283710/Why-Seamus-Heaneys-last-words-werent-the-last-laugh.html">Heaney's final text message enjoys laudatory reviews</a>, his late, latest and last poems should expect enthusiastic attention. <br />
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The poem was commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy, who asked writers to 'contribute to a memorial anthology marking the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war'. Each poet should find a letter, diary entry or poem from the time as a starting-point for their own work. Heaney chose Edward Thomas's <a href="http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/education/tutorials/intro/thomas/head_brass.html">'As the Team's Head-Brass'</a> (given as 'Head brass', without its hyphen, in the <em>Guardian</em> article), and has written a strong poem in response. The article quotes Matthew Hollis reporting that Heaney considered this to be 'perhaps his favourite' poem, but the sub-editing has probably muddled up what Hollis said. Heaney must have been talking about Thomas's poem, not his own: 'He admired what he called its "Homeric plane": the way a local conversation shadowed events on the world's field.' It's hard to imagine such a modest man as Heaney, even in private conversation, praising his own work for its 'Homeric plane'. <br />
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How many of his fellow contributors avoid the traps remains to be seen, but Heaney has been too astute to reach for barbed wire, shell-shocked Tommies, no-man's-land and <em>dulce et decorum est</em>, or to wring his hands at the horror and futility of it all. 'In a Field' is a beautifully poised poem of restitution, in which a demobbed soldier takes the young child by the hand and leads him 'Through the same old gate into the yard / Where everyone has suddenly appeared, / All standing waiting.' There is something of self-elegy about this ending (which is presumably why Duffy refers to it, with a certain exaggeration, as 'heartbreakingly prescient'). The journey through the gate is both physical and metaphysical, and those family members who have 'suddenly appeared', as if by magic, are simultaneously greeting the young child (and the war veteran) in this world and the recently deceased in the next. To borrow an ambiguous phrase which Heaney always enjoyed, 'In a Field' is a poem of 'seeing things'. It is much smaller than Thomas's poem, and wisely makes no attempt to compete, but it manages an understated perfection.Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-52515920428765665642013-10-17T10:30:00.001+01:002013-10-17T10:30:33.700+01:00The BBC's coverage of the First World War<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xcAZfLyfJnU/Ul-uCM0UisI/AAAAAAAAA5w/VnPj9Mz5bRs/s1600/bbc.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xcAZfLyfJnU/Ul-uCM0UisI/AAAAAAAAA5w/VnPj9Mz5bRs/s200/bbc.png" width="200" /></a></div>
You can find an anthology of teasers for the BBC's centenary coverage of the First World War <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/ww1/">here</a>. Yours truly appears at 10:04, introducing Ivor Gurney. From these brief highlights, the programmes look very promising. The BBC has evidently thought about how to challenge prevailing myths, hence much discussion about the necessity of the War, and more importantly, the necessity of <em>winning</em> it. Also apparent are attempts to move away from the Western Front: attention is given to the role of women at home, and to the fact that this was a <em>world </em>war<em> </em>(the clue being in the name, after all). <br />
<br />
History, particularly social history, dominates throughout. Poetry is accommodated via the Gurney documentary and a programme exploring some of the writers who fought at the Somme. I hope that the BBC will commission more documentaries about the art and literature of the War over the next five years. Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-2821432713867636622013-10-14T10:35:00.001+01:002013-10-15T08:14:24.809+01:00Ivor Gurney: 'The Stokes Gunners'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IVHI0BKfqX0/Ulu6nDPGGKI/AAAAAAAAA44/A7fJoKg0880/s1600/StokesMortarWesternFront.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IVHI0BKfqX0/Ulu6nDPGGKI/AAAAAAAAA44/A7fJoKg0880/s200/StokesMortarWesternFront.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
Follow <a href="http://blog.oup.com/2013/10/ivor-gurney-first-world-war-poetry/">this link</a> to the Oxford University Press blog, where my short piece on a previously unpublished poem by Ivor Gurney, 'The Stokes Gunners', appears today. Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-66654821552900619932013-10-09T11:04:00.001+01:002013-10-09T11:05:59.945+01:00Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199581443.do#.UlUak19wZ9A" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MH8Qy8hemc8/UlUaFzzjYPI/AAAAAAAAA4o/dKtKQLUEa_U/s400/Poetry+of+the+First+World+War+cover.jpg" width="261" /></a><em>Poetry of the First World War</em> is published today by Oxford University Press. It comes to 312 pages, plus an introduction and editorial notes. Dates of composition range from September 1914 (<a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/laurence-binyon-for-fallen.html">Binyon's 'For the Fallen'</a> and Kipling's 'For All We Have and Are') to September 1966 (Blunden's 'Ancre Sunshine'). I have also included several poems by Ivor Gurney which have never previously been published. </div>
<br />
Any anthologist of First World War poetry needs to tackle one question. Hasn't it been done before? The answer, of course, is: yes, many times. A war poetry anthology appeared in 1914, and the first soldier-poet anthology two years later. Frederic Brereton's <em>An Anthology of War Poems</em> (1930), accompanied by an introduction from Edmund Blunden, already contained many of the poets whom we would now consider canonical. The 1960s saw a new wave of anthologies, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of War. Yet by that stage their editorial biases were beginning to look exposed. Brian Gardner's <em>Up the Line to Death</em> (1964), which continues to be used as a teaching text even today, fails to find room for a single woman amongst its 72 civilian- and soldier-poets. <br />
<br />
An anthology like Gardner's, so egregious in its prejudices, demonstrates why each generation feels the need to revisit, challenge and revise the canon. There can be no definitive version, no last word. It is also true to say that contemporary editors have a considerable advantage over Gardner and his peers. Ian Parsons wrote in his introduction to <em>Men Who March Away </em>(1965) that 'To ascertain the precise date of composition of more than a hundred poems, many of which were written in the trenches and not published until long afterwards, was clearly impossible.' No doubt this explained why the first poem in his anthology (Edward Thomas's 'The Trumpet') was written after the last (Thomas Hardy's 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"'). But it did also allow Parsons to create what has now become an all-too-familiar trajectory from idealism to bitterness, in ignorance or wilful defiance of historical chronology. <br />
<br />
Today we have no such excuse. We know so much more than our predecessors, and are able to use authoritative editions (by, for example, Jon Stallworthy on Wilfred Owen, Vivien Noakes on Isaac Rosenberg, and Edna <span style="font-family: inherit;">Longley on Edward Thomas)
to pinpoint the order of composition and<span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans"; mso-bidi-language: HI; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: HI; mso-font-kerning: .5pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">—as far as possible<span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans"; mso-bidi-language: HI; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: HI; mso-font-kerning: .5pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";">—</span></span>establish accurate</span> texts. My anthology annotates every poem with a date of composition as well as detailed textual and explanatory notes. It has proven a Herculean task, made possible only by the brilliant scholarship of previous editors. I am not so dry-as-dust to maintain that the notes are more important than the poems, but stubborn facts do provide a corrective to our natural tendency to mythologise the War according to our own preoccupations and agendas. More than that, the notes should help to make the overly familiar strange, or at least allow it to be viewed from different perspectives: the fact that Winston Churchill (no less), as a young war reporter, was using the phrase <em>dulce et decorum est pro patria mori</em> ironically in his newspaper account of the Soudan campaign (1898) ought to give pause to those who believe that Owen's famous poem does something original and revolutionary.<br />
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Here are the poets I have included in the anthology: <br />
<br />
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)<br />
A. E. Housman (1859-1936)<br />
May Sinclair (1863-1946)<br />
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)<br />
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)<br />
Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)<br />
Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)<br />
Robert Service (1874-1958)<br />
Edward Thomas (1878-1917)<br />
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962)<br />
Mary Borden (1886-1968)<br />
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)<br />
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)<br />
Julian Grenfell (1888-1915)<br />
T. P. Cameron Wilson (1888-1918)<br />
Patrick Shaw Stewart (1888-1917)<br />
Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)<br />
Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)<br />
Arthur Graeme West (1891-1917)<br />
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)<br />
Margaret Postgate Cole (1893-1980)<br />
May Wedderburn Cannan (1893-1973)<br />
Charles Sorley (1895-1915)<br />
Robert Graves (1895-1985)<br />
David Jones (1895-1974)<br />
Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)<br />
Edgell Rickword (1898-1982)<br />
Music Hall and Trench SongsTim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-83141151691232653242013-10-07T15:09:00.000+01:002013-10-07T18:35:47.543+01:00Ivor Gurney at Third Ypres<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qG5njbrHJ4c/UlKzJwdeLrI/AAAAAAAAA2w/aMvHR65y-Rw/s1600/tank+WW1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qG5njbrHJ4c/UlKzJwdeLrI/AAAAAAAAA2w/aMvHR65y-Rw/s320/tank+WW1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A British tank stuck in a German trench at Cambrai</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Today's <em>Telegraph</em> features <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/10358335/WW1-The-siege-of-Fray-Bentos-at-the-Battle-of-Passchendaele.html">a story of extraordinary courage at Third Ypres</a>, recounting how the crew of a tank stuck in a crater endured three days of enemy attack before the survivors made it back to British lines. Tanks had been introduced into battle by the British in 1916, but like Hannibal's elephants, they often proved so unreliable that they shocked and awed friend and foe alike. Crews gave their tanks endearing nicknames like 'Fray Bentos', because they felt squashed like meat inside them. A direct hit would turn the tank into a cooker. <br />
<br />
Ivor Gurney was a machine-gunner at Third Ypres, practising (he tells us) his 'Scales and arpeggios' on the unlikeliest of musical instruments. Better that than killing Germans at close hand, although he was criticised by comrades for having taken what they considered to be a 'cushy' job. Machine-gunners were often targeted by artillery fire, although that may have still seemed preferable to going over the top with the battalion. From his hill overlooking the battlefield, Gurney 'watched Gloucesters go in a smother / Of gun smoke'. His closest friend, Don Hancox, was injured in the assault of 22 August 1917, and died of wounds the next day. <br />
<br />
Years later, in the asylum to which he had been confined, suffering from what was probably schizophrenia, Gurney remembered 'The stuck tanks' which had disappeared into the Belgian mud. Several remain there to this day. He won his ticket back to Blighty a fortnight later having inhaled gas, but he felt that the 'Real reason' had been the involuntary shaking of his body 'at such Hell of din'. Still, he could think admiringly of Passchendaele 'exalted and gilded' by September sun, and the courage in the faces of the men who went over<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">—</span>'many for the last time'.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-en57-v3miS4/UlK93lyvzJI/AAAAAAAAA3A/W4-LVvfkF9U/s1600/Passchendaele+today.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="424" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-en57-v3miS4/UlK93lyvzJI/AAAAAAAAA3A/W4-LVvfkF9U/s640/Passchendaele+today.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The battlefield of Third
Ypres today. © Brian Davies<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</tbody></table>
Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-41462721167505448692013-07-04T10:40:00.000+01:002013-07-04T14:22:05.157+01:00Round Up <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3FdKRpmKTYY/UdU3c1FuGMI/AAAAAAAAA2Y/oNSeP1tLLC8/s599/round+up.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3FdKRpmKTYY/UdU3c1FuGMI/AAAAAAAAA2Y/oNSeP1tLLC8/s320/round+up.jpg" width="305" /></a></div>
This blog has lain dormant during what has been a hectic few months for me, so here, by way of explanation, is a round up of some of the things I've been doing. I will be a more diligent blogger hereafter.<br />
<br />
Much of my time has been spent finishing, then editing, my forthcoming anthology: <a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199581443.do#.UdU4Vazwo1E"><i>Poetry of the First World War</i></a>. It will be published in hardback by Oxford World's Classics in October this year. I was trying to do more than throw together the familiar poems. There are, I hope, some surprising choices among the usual suspects, but I've also written detailed introductions for each of the represented poets, and the editorial apparatus includes date, location, explanation of allusions, etc. An introduction looks back over the century to see how social and political pressures have shaped the canon at different times. <br />
<br />
I've also been making a programme for BBC 4 on Ivor Gurney. The production team, <a href="http://www.otherroads.co.uk/">Other Roads</a>, has been saintly in its dealings with this tyro presenter. We have filmed in France and Belgium, and at some of Gurney's favourite locations around Gloucestershire. I've been very lucky to interview such illustrious experts along the way: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Chielens">Piet Chielens</a>, <a href="http://www.philiplancaster.com/">Philip Lancaster</a>, <a href="http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/people/Kennedy/Kate/">Kate Kennedy</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._J._Kavanagh">P. J. Kavanagh</a>, <a href="http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/about-us/directory/eleanor-rawling/">Eleanor Rawling</a>. There is still a bit more filming to be done in Kent and Gloucester. The programme will be broadcast in 2014, with the title <i>Ivor Gurney: The Poet Who Loved the War</i>. Fear not: this is not intended to imply that Gurney was a crazed warmonger. We are looking particularly at the surprising fact that Gurney suffered breakdowns before and after the War, and that he joined the army deliberately to give himself 'real things' rather than 'imaginary' to worry about (as he put it). Gurney hoped that the physical exertion would help his mental health, and to some extent he was right.<br />
<br />
My third task has been to begin preparations for the <a href="http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association/ww1poetry">centenary conference of First World War poetry</a>, which will be held in Wadham College, Oxford, on 5-7 September 2014. I am convening it on behalf of the English Association. Plenary speakers include <a href="http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SeamusHeaneyCentreforPoetry/Staff/ProfessorEdnaLongley/">Edna Longley</a> and <a href="http://history.yale.edu/people/jay-winter">Jay Winter</a>, with a special concert by <a href="http://www.ingpen.co.uk/artist/roderick-williams/">Roderick Williams</a> performing some war-related songs.There will be multiple panels, with academics and relevant poetry societies represented. Numbers are strictly limited, so if you're interested in attending and/or giving a paper, don't hang around.<br />
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Finally, I have made a small contribution to a terrific project run by Catriona Pennell and Ann-Marie Einhaus to consider how the First World War is taught in schools. If you are a teacher who would like to take part --- and to complete a survey --- please click <a href="http://ww1intheclassroom.exeter.ac.uk/">here</a>. You can also follow progress on<span lang="EN-GB"> Twitter
(@ww1classroom) and on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/WW1classroom">Facebook</a>.</span></div>
Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-31658057438646403452013-01-15T09:32:00.003+00:002013-01-15T09:32:53.690+00:00Isaac Rosenberg Statue Appeal<div align="left" class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://library.sc.edu/zellatest/cohen/images/rosen1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" jea="true" src="http://library.sc.edu/zellatest/cohen/images/rosen1.jpg" width="141" /></a></div>
A campaign has been launched by the Jewish East End Celebration Society to erect a commemorative statue of Isaac Rosenberg in Torrington Square, London. As the campaign states, 'The proximity to the two great learning centres in Rosenberg's life, Birkbeck and the Slade, makes this an even more fitting memorial to his genius.' It is astonishing that this would only be the fifth statue of a poet in London. To find out more, or make a donation, visit the campaign website <a href="http://www.jeecs.org.uk/rosenberg.html">here</a>. Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-77471430109574299912013-01-10T14:08:00.004+00:002013-01-10T14:16:24.810+00:00Shakespeare, the Somme, and the EU<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death may be three years distant, but plans are already afoot to mark the occasion with appropriate fanfare. And what better way to celebrate his genius than to fasten him to a dying animal? <br />
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The European Parliament in Brussels <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2013/jan/05/shakespeare-euro-laureate">has received a proposal to make Shakespeare the European laureate</a>. According to Ewan Fernie, Chairman of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, Shakespeare remains 'intimately important in European culture, not just as somebody or something for Stratford and not just for self-congratulatory English patriotism'. Readers are supposed to consent to the tautology: <em>of course</em> English patriotism is self-congratulatory, which could never be said of that noble Eurocratic project expensively pursued by the political classes of Brussels. Fernie may acknowledge that 'Shakespeare cannot be definitively identified with any political or religious lobby', but it is precisely the political lobby comprising the EU, and <em>not</em> the whole of Europe, which Shakespeare would be obliged to represent. What has the Bard done to deserve such an honour?<br />
<br />
These issues are, from certain angles, uncannily reminiscent of debates surrounding the tercentary of Shakespeare's death in 1916, a year in which events overtook long-planned celebrations. Israel Gollancz began his <a href="http://archive.org/stream/cu31924013146257#page/n13/mode/2up"><em>Book of Homage to Shakespeare</em></a> by noting dolefully that 'For years past<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">—</span>as far back as 1904<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">—</span>many of us had been looking forward to the Shakespeare Tercentenary as the occasion for some fitting memorial to symbolize the intellectual fraternity of mankind in the universal homage accorded to the genius of the greatest Englishman... Then came the War; and the dream of the world's brotherhood to be demonstrated by its common and united commemoration of Shakespeare, with many another fond illusion, was rudely shattered.' Gollancz's <em>Homage</em> collected contributions from across the world, but restricted itself to friendly nations; the many important German Shakespeareans of the day were conspicuously absent. A partisan audience hailed Shakespeare's universal genius. As John Lee has argued <a href="http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199559602.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199559602-e-8?rskey=dyzH4H&result=7&q=landscape">in a fine essay</a>, '<em>A Book of Homage to Shakespeare</em> is, and is not, a war work; Shakespeare is seen both as a support to the war effort and a symbol of liberal values which see recourse to war as failure.'<br />
<br />
It would be pleasing to believe that the EU will give careful thought to the question of whether Shakespeare is best treated as quintessentially English, or British, or European, or as a citizen of the world. But such lofty matters must come after a more basic requirement: if you want to pay homage to 'Shakespeare', make sure that, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/jan/26/francois-hollande-shakespeare?newsfeed=true">unlike François Hollande, you manage to choose the right one</a></span>.</span>Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-13829710583268531032013-01-02T20:27:00.001+00:002013-01-02T20:28:54.836+00:00John Jarmain: Flowers in the Minefields<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GxFcWH_8csM/UOSOQAkuELI/AAAAAAAAA14/GH5r7vZXbUo/s1600/Jarmain+Flowers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" eea="true" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GxFcWH_8csM/UOSOQAkuELI/AAAAAAAAA14/GH5r7vZXbUo/s320/Jarmain+Flowers.jpg" width="205" /></a></div>
<a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/john-jarmain.html">John Jarmain</a>, novelist and poet, was killed in Normandy within a month of D-Day. He had already enjoyed several lucky escapes during the desert campaign and in Italy. That luck ran out on 26 June 1944, when he came under German mortar bombardment in the village of St Honorine and was fatally wounded by a piece of shrapnel as he dived for a slit-trench. <br />
<br />
At that time, Jarmain was known as the author of one novel, <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/john-jarmain-slight-return.html"><em>Priddy Barrows</em></a>. His poems were published posthumously in late 1945 and attracted positive notices, but soon disappeared except for the occasional sighting in anthologies of Second World War poetry. <br />
<br />
Only now, with the publication of <a href="http://www.james-crowden.co.uk/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=42&category_id=6&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=27">this superb new edition</a> by the indefatigable James Crowden under his own Flagon Press imprint, can Jarmain's achievement be properly appreciated. The book collects Jarmain's poems along with essays by two of his military friends; Crowden also provides generous selections of photographs, and annotations of individual poems combine his own knowledge as an ex-officer with what has clearly been a forensic examination of Jarmain's life and works. If you want to know the angle at which a Stuka dives, James Crowden is the perfect editor, but he will also tell you where and when the poems were written and how they work <em>as</em> poems. Jarmain's work is enhanced by this attention: he was, undeniably, an uneven poet, but at his best he belonged among the finest of the War. <br />
<br />
Seventy years ago, give or take a day or two, Jarmain settled down to write 'New Year, 1943' at El Agheila. In it, he described himself standing 'tall and alone', only a 'shadow in an empty place' but making his 'lonely sign':<br />
<br />
Not to the year to come, the year that's gone,<br />
Not to the unimpassioned fields of space,<br />
But for myself, because the tale runs on; <br />
Because in this notch of time on the small round earth,<br />
Quite close across a little friendly sea<br />
One like myself has watched and answers me. Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-31266074567478482712012-11-20T12:43:00.001+00:002012-11-20T12:45:49.299+00:00The Erotic Poetry of the Bayonet<div align="justify" class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The French loved their bayonets. The image on the left is of the Rosalie, that most ostentatiously eroticised of all weapons. <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2JyNJtFdBX0C&pg=PA121&lpg=PA121&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false">In a song of 1914</a>, the Rosalie was celebrated as elegant in her tight-fitting sheath-dress. When she 'surged', terrible and naked, she pierced and excited the victim's body, and plunged herself into the roseate blood which inspired her name. She was, bizarrely, both lover (often described as the soldier's 'wife') and phallus, and her penetrative killings were also a rape. She made her soldier appear devastatingly sexual: <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2JyNJtFdBX0C&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false">according to another song</a>, when he marched through villages the local girls would gladly pay an écu---and give up their virtue---to play with his bayonet. <br />
<br />
English poetry of the War was a little more restrained. Siegfried Sassoon's <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/short-post-about-killing.html">'The Kiss'</a> surrenders to sadistic pleasure as it imagines the bayonet ('Sweet sister') entering the quailing body of the enemy, although Sassoon backs away slightly from the logic of his metaphor by describing the bayonet's thrust as a 'downward darting kiss'. An unpublished poem by Ivor Gurney, 'Joyeuse et Durandal', complains that his new bayonet is 'longer, certainly not stronger', and has 'no looks to speak of'; Gurney would prefer his old bayonet, 'Having caressed that fair blade with long fingers'. Similarly, Wilfred Owen in <a href="http://www.englishverse.com/poems/arms_and_the_boy">'Arms and the Boy'</a> invites the boy of the title to 'try along this bayonet-blade / How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood'; the bayonet is 'famishing for flesh'. These examples may be plain enough in their fetishisation of the bayonet, but they remain understated compared with the extremities of the French tradition. I once made passing comments about the sexual content of 'The Kiss' in a talk on Sassoon's poetry, and was astonished to be approached afterwards by a disapproving audience member who assured me that 'Sometimes, Sigmund, a cigar is just a cigar'. Even the most wilfully determined anti-Freudian would struggle to deny the extreme sexual violence apparent in the French cult of the bayonet. <br />
<br />
I am grateful to <a href="http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sll/staff/details.php?id=h.hutchison">Hazel Hutchison</a> for introducing me to an anglophone poem about the Rosalie. It is by the American poet Grace Fallow Norton (1876-1926), whose volume <em><a href="http://archive.org/stream/roads00nortgoog#page/n17/mode/2up">Roads</a></em> (1916) deserves wider attention. 'The French Soldier and His Bayonet' is suitably disconcerting:<br />
<br />
<strong>The French Soldier and His Bayonet </strong><br />
<br />
Farewell, my wife, farewell, Marie, <br />
I am going with Rosalie. <br />
<br />
You stand, you weep, you look at me— <br />
But you know the rights of Rosalie, <br />
<br />
And she calls, the mistress of men like me! <br />
I come, my little Rosalie, <br />
<br />
My white-lipped, silent Rosalie, <br />
My thin and hungry Rosalie! <br />
<br />
Strange you are to be heard by me. <br />
But I keep my pledge, pale Rosalie! <br />
<br />
On the long march you will cling to me <br />
And I shall love you, Rosalie; <br />
<br />
And soon you will leap and sing to me <br />
And I shall prove you, Rosalie; <br />
<br />
And you will laugh, laugh hungrily <br />
And your lips grow red, my Rosalie; <br />
<br />
And you will drink, drink deep with me. <br />
My fearless flushed lithe Rosalie! <br />
<br />
Farewell, O faithful far Marie, <br />
I am content with Rosalie. <br />
<br />
She is my love and my life to me. <br />
And your lone and my land—my Rosalie! <br />
<br />
Go mourn, go mourn in the aisle, Marie, <br />
She lies at my side, red Rosalie! <br />
<br />
Go mourn, go mourn and cry for me. <br />
My cry when I die will be ‘Rosalie!’ Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-18525670011722756922012-11-07T14:09:00.000+00:002012-11-11T14:15:31.417+00:00Wilfrid Gibson: 'Breakfast'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">‘I am one of those unlucky writers whose books have predeceased him.’ That was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfrid_Wilson_Gibson">Wilfrid Gibson</a>’s melancholic verdict in a letter to Robert Frost in the 1930s. It is a horrible irony that the sentence has taken on a life of its own: people who have never read Gibson’s poetry know that line, and a <em>Guardian</em> article by Robert McCrum earlier this year, titled <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/jan/18/predeceased-writers-work-dies">'Predeceased'</a>, used what McCrum called Gibson’s ‘candid self-knowledge’ as a starting-point for a general discussion of writers who have, as he put it, passed from celebrity to oblivion in their own lifetimes. Although hardly a celebrity at any stage, Gibson, in such accounts, becomes a touchstone for failure, a warning to overweening literary stars that their works may be soon forgotten. After all, no one can gainsay posterity, although Gibson in that letter to Frost did at least try, by continuing gloomily on the subject of his dead works, ‘I have no faith that posterity… will be likely to resuscitate them’. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Not much among Gibson's vast <em>oeuvre</em> deserves to have new life breathed into it, but there is one book of his which belongs among the most significant of the First World War. <em><a href="http://archive.org/stream/battle00gibs#page/n3/mode/2up">Battle</a></em>, published in 1915, has been credited as the first poetry to convey what Dominic Hibberd has called 'the actualities of the front line'; in doing so, it was admired by Rosenberg, Gurney and Sassoon, among others. Yet Gibson never saw active service. One of the oddities of First World War literary history is that it took a civilian to teach soldier-poets how to write realistically about their experiences.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So what does this radical work sound like? The counterintuitive answer is that it sounds extremely modest; it creates its effects through understatement, simple repetition, and a deliberately narrow range of formal and linguistic techniques. Take, for example, the short poem ‘Breakfast’: </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Breakfast </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We ate our breakfast lying on our backs, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Because the shells were screeching overhead. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I bet a rasher to a loaf of bread </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">That Hull United would beat Halifax</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">When Jimmy Stainthorp played full-back instead </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Of Billy Bradford. Ginger raised his head </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And cursed, and took the bet; and dropt back dead. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We ate our breakfast lying on our backs, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Because the shells were screeching overhead. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The form is related to triolet—it could almost be a triolet gone askew. Like triolet, there are only two rhymes, and like triolet, the first line repeats. The paucity of rhymes, the paucity of lines—this poem incorporates a death but ends where it began as though nothing has happened—gives the impression that everything here is mundane. Men at war eat on their backs, argue about football, and get shot and die. If anything, the football is more noteworthy than the sudden death: it certainly takes up more space. And the response to the death is unsentimental; everyone carries on eating breakfast. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">‘Breakfast’ was published in the <em>Nation</em> on 17 October 1914, just two months after Britain joined the War. Roger Hogg has pointed out that, a fortnight previously, the same publication had reported the anecdote of a Gordon Highlander: ‘When I got my wound in the leg it was because I got too excited in arguing with Wee Geordie Ferris, of our company, about Queen’s Park Rangers and their chances this season.’ It is not only through commitment to his own native region, or through the hint in that name ‘Wee Geordie Ferris’, that Gibson moves the football teams from London to the North East: of course, he needs the rhyme of ‘Halifax’ with ‘backs’. Gibson also increases the stakes, fittingly enough for a poem in which such a fatal bet takes place: the Highlander’s wound in the leg becomes Ginger’s deadly wound to (we assume) the head. Perhaps we are even to assume that the colour of Ginger’s hair has made him a more conspicuous target. Gibson makes strategic changes but does not work the anecdote too hard; there is no lecturing, no moral lesson, just an account of a fairly standard day at the Front.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">To appreciate Gibson’s achievement, it is necessary to bear in mind the kinds of poems which were being written in the early months of the War. Soldier poetry was not yet properly underway; Gibson’s friend Rupert Brooke, who was present at the Siege of Antwerp, may have been the first poet to have written about the War having seen active service, and his famous sequence of sonnets written from October to Boxing Day 1914 was first published in <em>New Numbers</em> (edited by Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie) several months later. There was rather too much of the loud, patriotic, often jingoistic verse, that inspired Charles Sorley to propose putting a fine on all references to God and England and ‘talk of a just war’. There were poems, mainly by civilians safely advanced in years, urging young men to join up (even Thomas Hardy couldn’t resist writing his <a href="http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/10059/">‘Call to National Service’</a> with its exhortation ‘Up and be doing’ and his wish that he were younger). And there was a smaller group of hand-wringing poems—Hardy wrote some of those, too—which regretted war as a Bad Thing. All these poems were, in their different ways, examples of what Harold Monro attacked as nothing more than newspaper ‘leading articles’. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘Breakfast’ and the other short poems which Gibson would collect together in <em>Battle</em> are therefore important as much for what they are not, as for what they are. Almost uniquely, they resist the siren songs of the age. The poet who had always sought to rid his verse of what he called ‘confectionery’, preferring the ‘bread and cheese’ sort, had found his subject: his war poetry avoids all pomp and bluster as it homes in on the countless individual horrors which constitute the total reality of the conflict. As Gibson wrote during the Second World War, ‘I cannot think of war only in terms of armies or of contending nations; it is to me a business of innumerable personal tragedies’. So in <em>Battle</em> we read of the man with his legs shot away, the man driven insane and ‘Neck-deep in mud’, the man whose life-blood oozes out of a ‘gaping gash’, but also the man whose homesickness is prompted by the smell of burning peat, and the man who wonders if the old cow on his farm died or not even as he is himself surrounded by the dead. Many of these stories Gibson must have heard recounted by returning veterans, or read (as with ‘Breakfast’) in newspapers of the day. His genius was to realise that, at a time when everyone had a noisy opinion to promulgate in verse, these were the true subjects for poetry. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">[This is an edited excerpt from a much longer piece on Wilfrid Gibson and the First World War, forthcoming in <a href="http://www.dymockpoets.co.uk/About.htm"><em>Dymock Poets and Friends</em></a>.]Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-17547472311179725412012-09-20T15:04:00.000+01:002012-09-20T15:04:28.481+01:00F. W. Harvey and Wilfrid Gibson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I will be speaking at two events in Gloucestershire during October. On Saturday 6 October, as part of the <a href="http://www.dymockpoets.co.uk/Events.htm">AGM weekend of the Friends of the Dymock Poets</a>, I will give a lecture on Wilfrid Gibson and the First World War. And on Saturday 27 October I will be at King's School, Gloucester, to talk to the <a href="http://www.fwharveysociety.co.uk/Society%20Events.htm">F. W. Harvey Society about a project to catalogue Harvey's papers</a>, which are about to be deposited on long-term loan at the Gloucestershire Archives. This is a joint project organised by the University of Exeter, the Trustees of Harvey's Estate, and the Archives itself. Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-48915473840122316632012-08-27T13:30:00.003+01:002012-08-27T17:35:49.378+01:00In Memoriam Dominic Hibberd<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Dominic Hibberd died on 12 August at his home in Oxfordshire. <br />
<br />
As a biographer, editor and literary critic, Hibberd made an immense contribution to the public and scholarly understanding of the First World War. He began his career as a scholar of Wilfred Owen, and his collection of publications on Owen—<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wilfred-Owen-A-New-Biography/dp/0753817098">a biography</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wilfred-Owen-Last-Year-1917-1918/dp/009472900X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346069229&sr=1-1">a book-length study</a>, and many essays—sets him apart as that poet’s most perceptive literary critic. Between them, Hibberd and Jon Stallworthy have ensured Owen's pre-eminence in discussions of modern war poetry, but as his biographers, at times they have seemed like rivals. The main area of contention was spelt out by Hibberd in the introduction to his biography: ‘One claim often made about Owen is undoubtedly true, although there are still people who prefer not to believe it. He was gay'. Hibberd's claim about Owen's sexuality is now established beyond reasonable doubt, and his biography amounts to an astonishing piece of scholarship—lucid, thorough, fluent, and extremely well researched—but its weakest point is an understandable desire to overstate what could have been more calmly asserted. Stallworthy had written his <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wilfred-Owen-Biography-Jon-Stallworthy/dp/019211719X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346069292&sr=1-1">authorised biography</a> under the watchful eye of Owen’s family, and had left gaps where exposure had been impossible. Once or twice, Hibberd is slightly too noisy (and speculative) in filling the silences. Yet Hibberd's is still the definitive Life, and I would group it among the finest biographies that I have read. Quite rightly, it pays meticulous attention to Owen’s wartime experiences, but it also gives a convincing account of Owen’s early years. <br />
<br />
The biography seems to have represented the culmination of Hibberd’s research on Owen, and it draws extensively on much of his previous scholarship. Yet his earlier work was not entirely superseded. Hibberd's article on Owen’s pararhyme (1978) remains the most perceptive treatment of that subject. He was never anything less than an accomplished close reader, always alive to poetry’s figures and patternings; and at his best he wrote an historically-informed formalist criticism which was deeply attentive to textual variants and complications. It is not least because of Hibberd's detailed editorial work that we are able to feel confident of the chronology of Owen’s development as a poet. <br />
<br />
From the start, Hibberd explored the work of other writers in Owen’s circle, most obviously Sassoon, Graves and Harold Monro. The impression given by his writing on the first two of those poets is that his attention is prompted more by their relationship to Owen than by any intrinsic interest. His contribution to a collection of essays on <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/art-of-collaboration-essays-on-robert-graves-and-his-contemporaries/oclc/312781394?tab=details">Robert Graves and his contemporaries</a> was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a piece assessing the influence of Graves on Owen, although <a href="http://robertgraves.org/issues/22/2255_article_290.pdf">another essay</a> in <em>Gravesiana</em> (2010) does suggest that Graves might have become significant for Hibberd’s scholarship in his own right. Sassoon remained less of a presence in Hibberd’s writings: he is studied only where he plays a role in Owen’s life and poetry. <br />
<br />
The work on Harold Monro is altogether more important. Until Hibberd took up his case, Monro was a man often cited but never studied. A poet himself, he was better known as an editor and bookseller, whose support encouraged many young poets especially during the war years. <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Harold-Monro-Poet-New-Age/dp/0333779347">Hibberd’s biography of Monro</a> manages the task of bringing its subject to life while recognising that many readers will be more concerned with the pen-portraits of the company he kept: not just Owen but Charlotte Mew, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Robert Frost, and many others. Monro was active at the time when the schism between Modernism and Georgianism occurred, and since then, poetry in English has never quite managed to heal the breach. Hibberd shows Monro to be a fascinating character for his close links with rival parties, but he also makes claims for him as a poet worthy of study. All the strengths apparent in Hibberd’s biography of Owen—its painstaking scholarship, its fluency, its ability to illuminate the work as well as the life—are repeated here. Hibberd has also done Monro the great service of making his poems readily available, first in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Meetings-Poems-Harold-Monro/dp/187339005X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346069753&sr=1-1">Strange Meetings: Poems by Harold Monro</a></em> (2003), and then in <em><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Harold_Monro_and_Wilfrid_Gibson.html?id=CGM6OAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Harold Monro and Wilfrid Gibson: The Pioneers</a></em> (2006).<br />
<br />
Apart from his work on Owen, it is as an anthologist that Hibberd is best known. Hibberd’s work here couples his impressive textual scholarship with a desire to expand the canon of First World War poetry. His first anthology, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Poetry-Great-War-An-Anthology/dp/0333362195">Poetry of the Great War</a></em> (edited with John Onions in 1986) was the first anthology to represent women satisfactorily alongside the more celebrated poetry of the soldier-poets. Hibberd described his next anthology, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Winter-World-Poems-First-War/dp/1845295153/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346069996&sr=1-1">The Winter of the World</a></em> (also with John Onions, 2007) as a further assault on ‘the 1960s myth’ of the War. Organised chronologically year by year, and with a final section covering the decade after the Armistice, this anthology is the most learned and inclusive to date. It exposes the shoddy scholarship of many of its predecessors, and challenges many of the common preconceptions about contemporary attitudes to the war and its poetry: for example, Hibberd and Onions rightly argue that it can be ‘misleading to assume that the Somme campaign... was a turning point for poetry by soldiers’, and their selection of poems proves their case. <br />
<br />
Hibberd has left us with substantial and groundbreaking biographies of Wilfred Owen and Harold Monro; his editorial work has helped to clarify Owen’s texts and to provide a confident chronology of that poet’s development; his literary criticism proved him to be a leading scholar of modern poetry; and the anthologies, particularly <em>The Winter of the World</em>, have brought to readers a new and expanded canon of First World War verse. It is an exemplary achievement, for which all of us who read war poetry must be grateful. Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-16528580536124506972012-08-21T10:54:00.000+01:002012-08-21T10:54:04.064+01:00Isaac Rosenberg Celebration<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A gala event to celebrate the life of Isaac Rosenberg will take place in Whitechapel on Sunday 2 September. There will be a guided walk through Rosenberg's East End, as well as readings by Ben Caplan and Jean Moorcroft Wilson. More details are available <a href="http://www.jeecs.org.uk/events3.html">here</a>. Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-11823112709712257382012-08-12T10:49:00.001+01:002012-08-12T19:30:16.792+01:00Gilbert Frankau<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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While putting the finishing touches to <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/anthologising-great-war.html">my anthology of First World War poetry for Oxford World's Classics</a>, I have been neglecting this blog. What better way to make amends than by starting a series of posts focusing on those poets who have been narrowly excluded from the anthology? I decided at an early stage that I would give generous coverage to a smaller number of significant poets, rather than trying to create an omnium gatherum of versifiers and poetasters. Even so, an anthologist always has regrets about the borderline cases, and this blog seems like the right place to seek expiation.<br />
<br />
Gilbert Frankau (1884-1952) has hovered at the edges of the war poetry canon for many decades. He is problematic for three reasons: he hated the Germans with an intensity matched only by his master, Rudyard Kipling; in 1933, he wrote an article for the <em>Daily Express</em> titled 'As a Jew I am not against Hitler' (but soon recanted); and there is the practical consideration that his wartime work remains in copyright in the UK. So, he is politically dubious, and his work comes with a price tag attached. The same is true (on both counts) of one or two other prominent war poets---Frankau was not alone among them in expressing support for Fascist leaders in the 1930s---but his work can be more easily ignored than theirs. As for copyright laws, the absurdity is compounded by the fact that his collected poems are freely available online <a href="http://archive.org/stream/poeticalworks01franuoft#page/n7/mode/2up">here</a> and <a href="http://archive.org/stream/poeticalworks02franuoft#page/n7/mode/2up">here</a>. Were I blogging from the US, I could include as many poems as I wanted in this post.<br />
<br />
Frankau joined the East Surrey Regiment in October 1914, later seeing action at Loos, Ypres and the Somme. He became a regular contributor of poetry to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipers_Times"><em>Wipers Times</em></a>, and published two war volumes: <em>The Guns</em> (1916) and <em>The City of Fear</em> (1917). In October 1916 he was sent to Italy to counter German propaganda via press and film campaigns. Suffering from delayed shellshock, he was invalided out of the army in February 1918, and began a successful career as a novelist. He served as a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve during the Second World War. <br />
<br />
Frankau was a gifted and authentic poet, although the attitudes expressed in a lyric like <a href="http://archive.org/stream/poeticalworks02franuoft#page/194/mode/2up">'The Beasts in Gray'</a> ('Let the sword decide what the sword began: / "No truce with the Beasts in Gray!"') have not dated well. Having described a friend's torture at the hands of German captors, Frankau in <a href="http://archive.org/stream/poeticalworks02franuoft#page/196/mode/2up">'The Reason'</a> sums up his unambiguous animosity towards the enemy:<br />
<br />
Hate! Not an individual loathing felt<br />
For this one gaoler or the <em>Kommandant</em><br />
(With pardon and trade orders for the rest)<br />
But absolute revulsion, merciless,<br />
Inexorable, reasoned, and approved---<br />
A plain man's hatred of the Unclean Folk.<br />
<br />
It comes as no surprise that the last phrase sounds like something out of <em>The Jungle Books</em>. Here as in so much of his work, Frankau took his cue from Kipling: his boastful admission, 'I've learnt how to hate', is a direct response to Kipling's <a href="http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_beginnings.htm">'The Beginnings'</a> ('When the English began to hate'). <br />
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Were Frankau's poetry one long hymn of hate, it would only be worth reading as a necessary corrective to the cherished myth that Tommy and Fritz were brothers-in-arms. But Frankau is much more compelling when he stops denouncing the Germans. Despite its title, <a href="http://archive.org/stream/poeticalworks02franuoft#page/30/mode/2up">'The Other Side'</a> has nothing to say about the beasts in grey, and more about attitudes in Blighty. The speaker of the poem is reacting to a book of verse sent to him by 'a former subaltern of his battery' who has somehow got back to England. His response is to condemn the florid rhetoric and abstract musings of this representative soldier-poet:<br />
<br />
My grief, but we’re fed up to the back teeth <br />
With war-books, war-verse, all the eye-wash stuff <br />
That seems to please the idiots at home. <br />
You know the kind of thing, or used to know: <br />
‘Heroes who laugh while Fritz is strafing them’— <br />
(I don’t remember that you found it fun, <br />
The day they shelled us out of Blauwport Farm!)<br />
[…] <br />
<br />
But what's the good of war-books, if they fail <br />
To give civilian-readers an idea <br />
Of what life is like in the firing-line… <br />
<br />
You might have done that much; from you, at least, <br />
I thought we’d get an inkling of the truth. <br />
But no; you rant and rattle, beat your drum. <br />
And blow your two-penny trumpet like the rest: <br />
‘Red battle’s glory,’ ‘Honour’s utmost task,’ <br />
‘Gay jesting faces of undaunted boys,’… <br />
The same old Boy's-Own-Paper balderdash! <br />
<br />
The kinds of poetry which Frankau here attacks (and which Arthur Graeme West had also attacked in <a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/diaryofdeadoffic00westrich#page/78/mode/2up">'God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men!'</a>) have now disappeared from the canon, leaving the impression that all soldier-poetry of the First World War was characterised by resistance and bitterness. But as the attacks themselves make clear, the bulk of the War's soldier-poetry continued to celebrate honour, glory, and a divinely-sanctioned patriotism. Modern readers tend to dismiss and despise such sentimentality, while clinging to the belief that the soldiers of either side felt no animosity towards their counterparts across no-man's-land. Frankau's poetry provides a valuable, if disconcerting, corrective to that equally sentimental but far more fashionable myth.Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-45452026911092861672012-05-31T15:46:00.002+01:002012-05-31T15:46:58.498+01:00The Art of Robert Frost<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2iqHyeF23rA/T8eB2sIEFEI/AAAAAAAAAy8/nG4laW6Cr30/s1600/Frost+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" rba="true" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2iqHyeF23rA/T8eB2sIEFEI/AAAAAAAAAy8/nG4laW6Cr30/s400/Frost+cover.jpg" width="276" /></a></div>
'Modest blogger', like 'honest politician', is an oxymoron rarely encountered. So I won't apologise for promoting <em><a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300118131">The Art of Robert Frost</a></em> on its US publication date. It is <a href="http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300118131">also available in the UK</a>. The book combines 65 of Frost's poems with my introduction and detailed close readings, and has been beautifully produced by Yale University Press.<br />
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To cleanse the palette, let me finish by promoting someone else's work. Simon Turner has a new blog called <em><a href="http://warandliterature.blogspot.co.uk/">Battle Lines</a></em>, which will devote itself to 'the poetry, fiction, memoirs and journalism of conflict, from WW1 to the present day.' Highly recommended.Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-42779083833900867802012-05-15T09:52:00.000+01:002012-08-12T19:31:00.510+01:00Mary Borden<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the most extraordinary women of the First World War was born on this day in 1886. </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.maryborden.com/"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mary Borden</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, a Chicago heiress whose father had made his fortune as a prospector and a property speculator, came to Britain before the War, having married a Scottish missionary. When he enlisted, she was also determined to contribute to the war effort, and seems to have been in no way distracted by the birth of her third child in November 1914. By the following January, she was in Belgium serving as a Red Cross volunteer, and in July 1915 she established her own hospital under French military authority. Before long, it could boast the lowest mortality rates on the Western Front. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As the areas of intense fighting moved, so did Borden: she founded a new hospital near Bray-sur-Somme in October 1916. The following year she wrote her masterpiece, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Forbidden-Zone-Nurses-Impressions/dp/1843914433">The Forbidden Zone</a></em>, which told of the conditions in which she worked: ‘Looking back, I do not understand that woman—myself—standing in that confused goods yard filled with bundles of broken human flesh. The place by one o’clock in the morning was a shambles. The air was thick with steaming sweat, with the effluvia of mud, dirt, blood.’ </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For her medical work, sometimes carried out while the hospital was under bombardment, Borden was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’honneur. But that was not the end of her courage. During the Second World War, she set up a field hospital in France—and barely managed to escape back to England as the country was overrun—then founded a mobile unit for the Free French in Palestine and Egypt. Even so, the memories of the French <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">poilus</i> of 1914-1918 endured: ‘I see them still, marching up the long roads of France in their clumsy boots and their heavy grey-blue coats that were too big for them; dogged, patient, steady men, plodding to death in defence of their land. I shall never forget them.’</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Borden was a prolific novelist, but today she is best and most deservedly remembered for <em>The Forbidden Zone</em>. Blocked from publication by military censors, the book would not appear until 1929, and fell into neglect for decades until a new interest in nurses' memoirs led scholars to champion her cause. But—perhaps surprisingly for a novelist—Borden writes a book which is more prose poem than memoir; eschewing chronology, it works by rhythm and repetition, and by offering stark tableaux vivants (not really short stories, despite Borden's intentions) which act out seemingly unconnected spots of time. <em>The Forbidden Zone</em> is a wonder. There is no other war writing remotely like it. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Borden did produce a handful of poems. Several of these were eventually published as part of <em>The Forbidden Zone</em>, although they have been dropped from the most recent edition. If her best prose is reminiscent of poetry, it is fitting that her poetry should return the compliment. </span><a href="http://archive.org/stream/2englishreview25londuoft#page/xii/mode/2up"><span style="font-family: inherit;">'At the Somme'</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> finds the gap between Whitman and prose, as demonstrated in the opening lines of its second section, 'The Song of the Mud':</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is the song of the mud. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the naked hills like satin, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The frothing, squirting, spurting liquid mud that gurgles along the road-beds, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under the hoofs of horses. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the War Zone. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jane Conway in her </span><a href="http://www.maryborden.com/page3/page3.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">superb biography</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> reports that Borden's friend, E. M. Forster, admitted to being completely baffled: 'Stuff curiously disposed in metrical lengths. Quite three pages of the prose ran into the rhythms of Hiawatha. I cannot make out what she is up to, but then never could.' Her refusal to succumb to orthodoxy can always be said in her favour, but Borden was not a natural poet except when writing prose. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">N.B. My thanks to Paul Groves for pointing out that Borden's much-loved Berkshire house, in which she died in 1968, is <a href="http://search.knightfrank.com/ASC110199">currently on the market for £3m</a>. </span>Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-15008891495017585952012-04-26T11:23:00.000+01:002012-04-26T11:31:30.443+01:00Wilfred Owen: 'Futility'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">On 4 February 1917, Wilfred Owen sent home his account of a recent tour of the ‘advanced Front Line’: ‘The marvel is that we did not all die of cold. As a matter of fact, only one of my party actually froze to death before he could be got back’. The platoon had been caught under bombardment and left 'marooned on a frozen desert' as high explosives fell around them. Owen was able to sleep briefly, but he woke believing himself in hell. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span><br />
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This episode directly inspired two of his best-known poems: ‘Exposure’ and ‘Futility’. He wrote the second of these in May 1918 at Ripon; </span><a href="http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/db/results.php?CISOBOX1=wilfred+owen&CISOBOX2=&CISOBOX3=poem&CISOBOX4=Futility&CISOFIELD1=langua&CISOFIELD2=covera&CISOFIELD3=objecb&CISOFIELD4=title&CISOOP1=all&CISOOP2=exact&CISOOP3=exact&CISOOP4=exact&CISOROOT=%2Fww1&CISOSORT=descri%7Cf"><span style="font-family: inherit;">the surviving manuscripts</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> are remarkably neat, suggesting that the poem came quickly in something close to its finished form. Owen was an inveterate reviser, but this time few revisions were needed. 'Futility' became one of only five of Owen's poems to have been published during his lifetime: it appeared in the <em>Nation</em> on 15 June 1918.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Futility</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Move him into the sun— </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Gently its touch awoke him once, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">At home, whispering of fields half-sown. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Always it woke him, even in France, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Until this morning and this snow. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">If anything might rouse him now </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The kind old sun will know.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Think how it wakes the seeds— </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Woke once the clays of a cold star. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Was it for this the clay grew tall? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To break earth’s sleep at all?</span><br />
<br />
'Was it for this the clay grew tall?' The phrasing is Wordsworthian, remembering lines from Book 1 of <em>The Prelude</em>: <span style="font-size: 11pt;">‘Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song…?’ Wordsworth's self-disgust contrasts mediocre adulthood with the glorious riches of his infancy and youth. 'Futility' jabs its finger not at individual agency but at universal forces which seem benign but are only 'fatuous'. They 'woke the clays of a cold star', but the human clay which is the immediate subject of Owen's poem cannot be woken. The sun is what Beckett's Hamm would later call an 'accursed progenitor', its kindness a waste which verges on abuse. The poem's title insists that it is futile to hope that those limbs will 'stir'; more than that, life is itself an exercise in futility. The question directed at whatever made those fatuous sunbeams toil is: why bother?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">In this respect, 'Futility' has always seemed to me a counterpart of Blake's 'The Tyger'. Blake's poem constitutes a terrifying argument from design: examine the 'fearful symmetry' of the tyger, and draw your own conclusions about the 'immortal hand or eye' capable of shaping such a beast. Owen replaces terror with contempt: what kind of idiot creator would have gone to so much effort only to see that work squandered by such destruction? As the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran put it, 'There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be'. 'Futility' comes close to proving the opposite. Who would not prefer the unrealised potential of 'earth's sleep' to the gruesome pantomine by which the clay grows tall and 'full-nerved' only to be cruelly and unnecessarily razed? </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">N. B. For any victims of AQA's conflict cluster, here are accounts of <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/ted-hughes-bayonet-charge.html">Ted Hughes's 'Bayonet Charge'</a> and <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/aqa-gcse-english-does-it-teach-anything.html">Jane Weir's 'Poppies'</a>. And here is my reading of Owen's <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/wilfred-owen-dulce-et-decorum-est.html">'Dulce et Decorum Est'</a>. </span>Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-2273013821229877242012-04-12T15:02:00.003+01:002012-04-18T18:28:26.665+01:00British Poetry of the First World War: Centenary Conference<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xhQrF2FrvU0/T4bfRVa62DI/AAAAAAAAAxY/GyMLa3M739U/s1600/Wadham_College_Oxford_Oxford.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="194" qda="true" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xhQrF2FrvU0/T4bfRVa62DI/AAAAAAAAAxY/GyMLa3M739U/s320/Wadham_College_Oxford_Oxford.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The <a href="http://www.le.ac.uk/engassoc/">English Association</a>'s Centenary Conference on British Poetry of the First World War will take place at <a href="http://www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/">Wadham College, Oxford</a>, on 5-7 September 2014. As well as scholars from around the world, many of the relevant poetry societies will be taking part. More details will follow in due course, including information about keynote speakers, accommodation and costs. Please get in touch via my Exeter email address (<a href="http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/english/staff/kendall/">here</a>) if you would like to be kept up to date as plans develop.<br />
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Edited to add: please note the revised date, as listed above.Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-19260257973222357962012-04-02T13:54:00.002+01:002012-04-26T21:32:40.662+01:00Ted Hughes: 'Bayonet Charge'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XSzJvwy3_b8/T3mCfe3F6uI/AAAAAAAAAxI/hS03P7kBbl4/s1600/bayonet-charge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" dea="true" height="237" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XSzJvwy3_b8/T3mCfe3F6uI/AAAAAAAAAxI/hS03P7kBbl4/s320/bayonet-charge.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I have already <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/aqa-gcse-english-does-it-teach-anything.html">said my piece</a> about the AQA GCSE poetry syllabus and what it calls the 'Conflict' cluster. (I take 'cluster' to be the AQA's decorous abbreviation of a <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clusterfuck">more accurate military term</a> which, alas, cannot be used on a family-friendly blog.) Now I will do my best to help those unfortunates brought to this site in search of information about one particular poem: <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Ted Hughes's 'Bayonet Charge'<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">. What follows is a set of loose notes. Anyone inclined to explore Hughes's treatment of war more generally can read my essay on that very subject <a href="http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-927676-5.pdf">here</a>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">1. 'Bayonet Charge' was published in Hughes's first collection, <a href="http://www.thetedhughessociety.org/thehawkintherain.htm"><em>The Hawk in the Rain</em></a> (1957). It belongs among a group of poems dealing with the First World War, in which the poet's father and uncle fought. Hughes grew up believing that 'the whole region [West Yorkshire] was in mourning' for that War. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">2. 'Suddenly he awoke and was running'. Which is the dreamworld and which the reality? The poem wants to confuse the two: Hughes's protagonist wakes into nightmare. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">3. '[R]aw / In raw-seamed hot khaki'. Here is the first<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">—</span>but at this stage still fairly inconspicuous<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">—</span>debt to <a href="http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/document/5196/4557">'Spring Offensive'</a>, Wilfred Owen's only poem about a bayonet charge. The repetition of 'raw' mimics a similar repetition in line 2 of Owen's poem: 'eased of pack-loads, were at ease'. And the word 'hot' prepares for a poem of suddenly changing temperatures: 'molten', 'cold', 'flame'. This technique is straight out of 'Spring Offensive': 'warm', 'sun', 'hot', 'burned', 'flames', 'cool'. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">4. The first stanza is nothing if not sweaty. '[H]is sweat heavy' prepares for the perplexing image of lines 7-8: 'The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye / Sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest'. It is hard to manipulate this image into anything approaching sense. Can tears sweat? Why has the tear been relocated from the eye to the chest? The poem clumsily seeks to convey the message that patriotism has given way to a visceral panic. There may be a distant memory of Sassoon's advice to Owen: 'Sweat your guts out writing'. Certainly, the reference to 'Bullets smacking the belly out of the air' contributes to that determined anatomical insistence.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">5. 'He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm'. Keats said that we hate poetry which has palpable designs upon us. Hughes's designs, here, are all too palpable as he evokes the wounded body. But would a smashed arm really be 'numb'?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">6. 'In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations'. The stars and the nations<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">—</span>which is to say the powers celestial and terrestrial<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">—</span>are cold and mechanistic. They feel nothing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">7. 'He was running / Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs / Listening between his footfalls for the reason / Of his still running'. This simile offers little reward to the reader patient enough to unpick its convoluted syntax. The image is virtually tautological: he was running like someone would run if he found himself in the same situation as our protagonist. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">8. 'Then the shot-slashed furrows // Threw up a yellow hare'. Yellow? Even the best animal poet since John Clare will not persuade anyone of that. The hare does bring to our attention one curious fact: it is the only other living creature in the poem. No soldiers are mentioned. For that matter, there are no corpses, either. The eye which is at liberty to spot a flushed hare might be expected to notice bodies of one kind or another. Perhaps, then, this poem <em>does </em>describe a dream?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">9. 'And crawled in a threshing circle'. Cf. 'Spring Offensive': 'And crawling slowly back'. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">10. 'He plunged past with his bayonet toward the green hedge'. Cf. 'Spring Offensive': 'plunged and fell away past this world's verge'. Or, if you prefer, cf. <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/wilfred-owen-dulce-et-decorum-est.html">'Dulce et Decorum Est'</a>: 'He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning'. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">11. 'King, honour, human dignity, etcetera / Dropped like luxuries'. Yes, of course they did, but even Hughes knows that he is going through the motions. That word 'etcetera' admits that we have heard it all before, that the treatment is hackneyed, that 'Bayonet Charge' is too much a performance, a reconstruction. It has been done elsewhere, and more successfully. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">12. 'To get out of that blue crackling air / His terror's touchy dynamite'. Odd that at the moment of defeat, Hughes ends the poem with its finest lines. ('[B]lue... air' convinces as 'yellow hare' does not.) The enjambment deliberately misleads: the reader might expect the protagonist simply to want to 'get out of that blue crackling air', that is, to escape from the battle. The continuation of the sentence conveys the panicked inventiveness of a protagonist who is still, despite everything, an active agent. We are left with the bizarre, powerful image of the soldier scrabbling at the air in an effort to rid it of his own desperate terror. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Hughes wrote far better poems than 'Bayonet Charge'. Owen wrote far better poems than Hughes about the War, as 'Spring Offensive' demonstrates. The question for the AQA examiners must be: why favour the copy over the original? </span></span><br />
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Postscript: for an account of Jane Weir's 'Poppies', see <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/aqa-gcse-english-does-it-teach-anything.html">here</a>. And <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/wilfred-owen-futility.html">here</a> is my reading of Wilfred Owen's 'Futility'.Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2499661274163551793.post-8721076121787947132012-03-26T19:00:00.000+01:002012-03-26T19:00:53.282+01:00John Allan Wyeth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eTh_o1Kq0Qg/T3Cte2l2_qI/AAAAAAAAAxA/BhWlsDMpat8/s1600/wyeth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img aea="true" border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eTh_o1Kq0Qg/T3Cte2l2_qI/AAAAAAAAAxA/BhWlsDMpat8/s200/wyeth.jpg" width="186" /></a></div>His poetry having been neglected for 80 years, John Allan Wyeth is at long last receiving appropriate attention. BJ Omanson has established a new blog (<a href="http://johnallanwyeth.blogspot.co.uk/">here</a>) in Wyeth's honour, and has posted <a href="http://johnallanwyeth.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/on-afternoon-of-september-14-1918-after.html">an excellent essay of his own</a> on Wyeth's work. The blog also lists many online resources, including <a href="http://www.hudsonreview.com/su08/su08gioia.pdf">an assessment by Dana Gioia</a> of Wyeth's achievement, and <a href="http://war-poets.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/John%20Allan%20Wyeth">three blogposts by yours truly</a>. <br />
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Wyeth is a fantastic poet. If there is a better American soldier-poet of the First World War, I haven't encountered him yet.Tim Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17917270014209480898noreply@blogger.com3