War Poetry

Keith Douglas Redivivus

2012-01-24T15:43:00.010Z

'Ted did a beautiful [BBC] programme on a marvelous young British poet, Keith Douglas, killed in the last war... Both of us mourn this poet immensely and feel he would have been like a lovely big brother to us. His death is really a terrible blow and we are trying to resurrect his image and poems...'—Sylvia Plath to her mother, 7 June 1962.

24 January is Keith Douglas's birthday. He would have been 92 today, had he survived the War. His work has meant at least as much to me as that of any other modern poet. I began Modern English War Poetry with the sole objective of honouring his achievement. And although poems about poets are not to be encouraged, I had to write a poem about him. If you aren't familiar with his work, start with the poems, then read that wonder among war memoirs, Alamein to Zem Zem.

What if? By the age of 24, Douglas had already written some of the finest lyrics. Is there a more honest war poem than 'Vergissmeinnicht'? A more brutal description of battlefield detritus than 'Cairo Jag'? A better animal poem than 'The Marvel' or 'The Sea Bird'? Contrast what his near-contemporary, Philip Larkin, had managed at that age. Douglas is the great lost poet of his century.

War Horse Poetry

2012-01-19T10:04:00.003Z

The most famous horse in war poetry was made out of wood. The Trojans do not seem to have been especially bright.

Poetry of the First World War mentions horses rarely. Hardy's 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"' and Thomas's 'As the team's head-brass' describe horses ploughing the English countryside, and there are passing references to horses at the Front in Hardy's '"And There Was a Great Calm"', Borden's 'At the Somme', Grenfell's 'Into Battle' and Gurney's 'Pain'. The last of these is particularly powerful:

Seeing the pitiful eyes of men foredone,
Or horses shot, too tired merely to stir,
Dying in shell-holes both, slain by the mud.

The story which comes closest to full-blown Spielbergian sentimentality, however, is told by Charlotte Fyfe in The Tears of War, an account of the doomed love affair between May Wedderburn Cannan and Bevil Quiller-Couch (son of Q). In August 1918, Cannan was working for a branch of M15 in the War Office Department in Paris. Two days after the Armistice, she became engaged to Bevil Quiller-Couch, who had come to Paris on leave to propose. Having survived the War and won the Military Cross, Quiller-Couch rejoined his battery in Germany early in 1919, but became ill in early February, and died of pneumonia following flu. The poems in Cannan's second book, The Splendid Days, chart the descent from the exhilaration of the Armistice and reciprocated love, to the devastation caused by her fiancé’s death.

Q acquired his son's charger, Peggy, at auction, and brought her back to Fowey where she lived out her remaining years. On first meeting her, Q felt the bond: 'Whether or not she detected something familiar in my footstep when I went into the loose box, she was waiting for me. Took no notice of the stableman, but came straight to me, snuffled me all over the chest and then bent down her neck like "Royal Egypt". While I stroked her, she nuzzled my wrist and back of my other hand... It sounds silly, but it seemed as if the creature really did know something and was trying to say it.'

May remained close to her would-have-been father-in-law, and rode Peggy on her visits to Fowey. She wrote a 32-line poem called 'Riding', which is published only in The Tears of War:

The roads are narrow in Cornwall and set between
Stiff wind-cropped hedges that shelter as you ride;
They were sadder roads and bare that he knew in France
The poplars on each side...

He must have ridden her often, felt the lilt
Of the sure swift strength moving between his knees,
And I came near him a second, riding so,
Dreams, but Love lives by these.

Any other horses?

Edmund Blunden

2012-01-17T08:49:00.009Z

Edmund Blunden is a war poet about whom I have said next to nothing on this blog. His work will not pass out of copyright in the UK until 2045, which is a long time to wait. So---taking his death date of 20 January 1974 as the slenderest of hooks---I now comment on his achievement via some of the resources which are freely available online. The best of these are the official website, including such gems as a recording of Blunden reading one of his war poems, and the large Edmund Blunden Collection at the First World War Digital Archive.

His biographer, Barry Webb, has suggested that Blunden ‘spent more time in the trenches than any other recognised war writer’. He came through two years at Festubert, Ypres and Passchendaele unscathed, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1916 after reaching the German line on a reconnaissance mission. During a distinguised post-war academic career, Blunden became a champion of war poetry. He edited Owen (1931) and Gurney (1954), wrote the foreword to Frederick Brereton's An Anthology of War Poems (1930) and Brian Gardner's Up the Line to Death (1964), and at Merton College, Oxford, tutored Keith Douglas, who would become the most brilliant poet of the Second World War.

As for his own work, Blunden remained unfailingly modest. In his prose memoir, Undertones of War (1928), he recalled his youthful self as a 'harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat'. The pastoral and the martial pull against each other in all his best poetry. Blunden often gives the impression that he wants to be nothing more than a minor Georgian, complete with archaic diction and mellifluous syntactical inversions; but like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he is transformed into a significant poet at the point when the War forces him to confront a more modern and brutal world. It is artistically regrettable---if psychologically explicable---to find that in The Waggoner (1920) the 'harmless young shepherd' should have so quickly and thoroughly usurped the soldier.

The reprieve was temporary; the War never released Blunden. 'I must go over the ground again', he wrote in Undertones of War, and spoke of a similar compulsion in an interview from the 1960s: 'My experiences in the First World War have haunted me all my life and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.' Where his wartime poems juxtapose soldier and shepherd, the best of his post-war work creates a similar juxtaposition of past and present, soldier and veteran. Blunden is not a poet of protest like Sassoon, or a poet of witness like Owen, or a documentary poet as Gurney and Jones can sometimes be. Blunden is one of the great poets of memory: of what can and cannot be remembered; of what must be remembered; of what would be better forgotten if only that were possible. The act of remembering is itself the drama of his poetry. 'Can you Remember?', written in January 1936, begins with the promise that the poet can 'still remember / The whole thing in a way', although there are gaps and hesitations: 'Edge and exactitude / Depend on the day'. Place-names, Blunden goes on to admit, may be forgotten. But the scene can become suddenly and unexpectedly vivid with an intensity which will not distinguish the happy from the horrific:

       at the instance
Of sound, smell, change and stir
   New-old shapes for ever
Intensely recur.

And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
   Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
   Shrieking, dumb, defiled.

And so on, until Blunden's final poem, 'Ancre Sunshine', which Rennie Parker and Margi Blunden have called 'the last poem about the war published by any surviving soldier poet'. Visiting the battlefields with his wife fifty years later, Blunden ends his poem with a luminous vision:

All that had fallen was in its old form still,
For her to witness, with no cold surprise,
In one of those moments when nothing dies.

Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen

2012-01-03T09:49:00.007Z

Last Remembrance Day saw the publication of a new Penguin anthology. Three Poets of the First World War: Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen is edited by Jon Stallworthy and Jane Potter. The book can be strongly recommended, not only for the poems but for its editorial apparatus. The detailed annotations for each poem enrich even the most familiar texts.

Why these poets? Penguin has always liked to publish poets in threes, so the number is unsurprising. But Owen, Gurney and Rosenberg have little in common except their genius. Gurney survived the War, Owen and Rosenberg did not; unlike Owen, Gurney and Rosenberg excelled at two arts; Gurney and Rosenberg were 'common privates', Owen an officer; Owen and Rosenberg have been central to any discussion of war poetry since the 1920s, whereas Gurney's reputation was much slower to develop; Owen and Rosenberg have been served by world-class textual scholars (Jon Stallworthy and Vivien Noakes respectively), Gurney has not---at least not across the bulk of his writings. The introduction tries to insist on coherence by claiming that these are 'three young men of the English underclass', but that's a stretcher: Owen's family was more genteel than Gurney's, and Rosenberg endured a desperate poverty far beyond the ken of either of his fellow poets. As Ezra Pound inimitably put it, Rosenberg 'has something in him, horribly rough but then "Stepney, East"… we ought to have a real burglar… ma che!!!'

Although the editors don't quite spell it out, the selection of the poets for this anthology is motivated by value judgement. There can be no more honourable criterion than that. (Were I allowed five poets, I would add Sassoon and Jones and be confident that---Sorley having died so soon and Thomas having written almost nothing in France---all the best English soldier-poets were included.) Owen and Rosenberg are represented by all their familiar works and a few unfamiliar; if you own this anthology, you have their essential poems. The situation with Gurney is more complicated, not least because so much of his best work remains unpublished; and the poetry which did appear in his lifetime was, with one or two astonishing exceptions, fairly average. It takes an act of faith to read through the first half-dozen poems in Gurney's selection, until with 'Half Dead' the reader is overwhelmed with an extraordinary vision of terrestrial hell and of brutal redemption:

Half dead with sheer tiredness, wakened quick at night
With dysentery pangs, going blind among dim sleepers
And dazed into half dark, illness had its spite.
Head cleared, eyes saw; pangs and ill body-creepers
Stilled with the cold---the cold bringing me sane....

Like so many of Gurney's poems, 'Half Dead' goes askew a few lines later. Gurney is unprecedented in his ability to juxtapose genius and incompetence, and for that reason he seems to have caused Stallworthy and Potter the most problems. But they bravely accept the challenge by including more of Gurney's poems than Owen's or Rosenberg's.

The anthology is dedicated 'with affection and gratitude' to the memory of Vivien Noakes, 'editor and champion of Isaac Rosenberg'. It is a fitting tribute to a woman whose work on Rosenberg provides an exemplary model for any textual scholar.

G K Chesterton: 'For a War Memorial'

2011-12-20T17:15:00.009Z

Towards the end of this post is a question to which I hope that one of my readers may have the solution.

As reported previously, I am currently editing a large anthology of First World War poetry for Oxford World's Classics. Each poem will be annotated and given a date of composition. Allusions to places, poems, battles, and so on will be noted and explained.

Charlotte Mew will be represented by three poems, the longest of which is 'The Cenotaph'. The poem first appeared in The Westminster Gazette on 7 September 1919, and it seems reasonable to assume that Mew wrote it in July or August of that year. The word 'Cenotaph' (from the Greek for 'empty tomb') was current thanks to Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose wood-and-plaster structure was unveiled at Whitehall in July 1919; he replaced it with a near-identical stone structure at the same spot in 1920. (Lutyens had been commissioned to design a 'catafalque'; the 'cenotaph' was his own term.)

Mew may also have known Lutyens’s plans for a more elaborate war memorial in Southampton, a city which she passed through regularly on family trips to the Isle of Wight.
However, neither the London nor the Southampton Cenotaph depicts what Mew describes: 'Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column’s head’. Her poem is an example of what John Hollander calls 'notional ekphrasis'—the verbal representation of an imaginary work of art.

Mew's was by no means the only poem to consider the proprieties and the inadequacies of war memorials at that time. G. K. Chesterton's 'For a War Memorial' (below) was collected in The Ballad of St Barbara and Other Verses (1922). Chesterton's editor, Aidan Mackey, proposes a date of composition between 1918 and 1920, and he has told me that he considers 1919 most likely. The mystery is: who had read whom? 'The hucksters haggle in the mart', Chesterton begins, either remembering or inspiring Mew's depiction of 'every busy whore's and huckster's face / As they drive their bargains' in 'the Market-place'.

In the absence of further evidence, I have to assume that Chesterton had read Mew. But if any reader knows of an earlier publication date for Chesterton's poem, please let me know.

For a War Memorial
(Suggested Inscription probably not selected by the Committee.)

The hucksters haggle in the mart
The cars and carts go by;
Senates and schools go droning on;
For dead things cannot die.

A storm stooped on the place of tombs
With bolts to blast and rive;
But these be names of many men
The lightning found alive.

If usurers rule and rights decay
And visions view once more
Great Carthage like a golden shell
Gape hollow on the shore,

Still to the last of crumbling time
Upon this stone be read
How many men of England died
To prove they were not dead.

Remembrance Day 2011: Podcasts, Publications, Poets Laureate

2011-11-15T08:51:00.014Z

Over the past fortnight, discussions of war poetry have abounded.

The Guardian's excellent series of podcasts included an Armistice Day edition featuring Michael Morpurgo, Louisa Young and Andrew Motion. My usual complaint about Motion---a passionate advocate for war poetry--- is that he tends to reduce it to pity and waste. In Motion's hands, war poetry sounds strangely comforting; it is well behaved in saying what he wants to hear. Yet when he has the right subject, he is extremely eloquent, and he talks movingly and truthfully here about contemporary soldier-poets.

Michael Morpurgo is another whose absolute faith in the futility myth avoids inconvenient truths about the necessity of fighting in order to survive as a nation ('lest / We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed', as Edward Thomas put it). Morpurgo argues in the podcast that our only way of approaching the war now is through the experience of an individual (whether it be a human as in Private Peaceful, or the horse of War Horse). This runs counter to Geoffrey Hill's argument in The Triumph of Love, which grotesquely parodies the Spielberg approach to genocide: 'refocus that Jew---yes there, / that one.' Morpurgo and Hill share a starting point: we can make sense of one death, not of millions. Morpurgo implies that we can extrapolate. Hill insists that the act of making sense falsifies the magnitude of the suffering. Thinking that we understand, we only betray. Hill's is the most discomforting assault on the easy sentimentality underlying so many modern-day representations of war. I wish that the Guardian would bring together Morpurgo, Motion and Hill for unflinching discussion: the podcast would be superb.

An earlier Guardian podcast examined rhetoric in the Iliad, and featured Alice Oswald whose Memorial is based on Homer's epic. I look forward to reading Oswald's book, which is the subject of a positive review by Simon Turner here. I am less persuaded by Oswald's comments in an interview given previously to the Guardian: 'That [Homer's Iliad] turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes–it's become a clichéd, British empire part of our culture.' So Oswald doesn't like public schools, glamorising war, or the British Empire: she is, after all, speaking to the Guardian. But does anyone really hold that 'public school' view about Homer? Because of Owen's influence, the misreading of Homer is likely to be in the other direction: that Homer is about nothing but the pity of war. I only wish that public schools did still teach Homer.

I must end with a few words about Carol Ann Duffy, accepting that the poet laureateship is an anachronistic public challenge which the incumbent can never win. Even so, when she remarks of a new anthology of soldier-poetry that it is 'humbling, allowing the voices of those whose lives have been changed by war to speak to us', I wonder at her use of 'allowing'. And when she serves up her annual slop of First World war clichés in the Guardian (which, on this occasion, really should know better), she would do well to remember that she is writing about something more significant than the latest royal engagement, or whether sherry tastes of the sea. This is Great-War-by-Numbers. Next year, expect to read about shell-shocked Tommies shot at dawn by General Haig.

Remembrance of Things Past

2011-11-06T08:58:00.004Z

It's the time of year when visitors turn up in vast numbers at this blog looking for Laurence Binyon's 'For the Fallen'. I like to be helpful, so here in one handy blogpost are all your Remembrancetide needs. Binyon is your man if you are prepared to wait until stanza 4; McCrae is punchier, certainly more pugilistic: you will need to ignore the final stanza's call to arms, or at least pretend that, as long as it is read in a suitably sombre tone, no one need worry about what it means.

Laurence Binyon, 'For the Fallen'

John McCrae, 'In Flanders Fields'

Then there is David Cameron's favourite poem, Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'; or, if you want something more unusual, you could choose Charlotte Mew's 'The Cenotaph'. Mew tells us the uncomfortable truth---which politicians of all stripes never fail to confirm---that remembrance can be conveniently reduced to nothing more than a public gesture, a performance, a token monument. As Geoffrey Hill, our greatest living poet, bitterly complains, England has become 'a nation / with so many memorials but no memory'.

American Poets of the Second World War

2011-11-01T09:47:00.006Z

From this distant perspective, the American attitude towards its war poets has always seemed perplexing. War poetry is something peculiarly English. Ask a literate American to name a war poet, and she is more likely to mention Owen than Whitman or Melville.

Recent years have seen the publication of a number of books which suggest that, at last, American awareness of its own war poetry may be growing. Lorrie Goldensohn's anthology of American war poetry demonstrated the extent of the tradition with poems from the colonial wars to Afghanistan; Cynthia Wachtell's War No More proved that it was the American Civil War which first challenged poets to write of industrialised slaughter; and the recent rediscovery of John Allan Wyeth has given Americans a Great War poet who can rank among the best of the Brits.

Diederik Oostdijk's new study, Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II, ought to inspire a new map of twentieth-century American poetry in which the poetry of war is no longer occluded. Until now, the 'middle generation' of poets, falling between Modernism and the various movements which came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s (Confessionalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain), has been squeezed or altogether ignored: powerful though they are, the five lines of Randall Jarrell's 'The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner' should not be a synecdoche for such a vast and diverse body of war poetry. Oostdijk's book retrieves into prominence a group of poets who were mostly (but not all) servicemen---not just Jarrell but Anthony Hecht, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, James Dickey, Robert Lowell, William Stafford, Lincoln Kirstein. Like the greatest of their English contempories, Keith Douglas, they were haunted by the examples of earlier war poets. Oostdijk takes the title of his first chapter from a comment made by Karl Shapiro in a letter home: 'Im [sic] no Wilfred Owen, darling'.

Oostdijk writes pellucid English like only a Dutchman can. He has a pitch-perfect ear for nuances of meaning: this is a learned and historically-informed study, but its greatest strength is in close readings. Those readings draw on vast reserves of research, and display an impressive knowledge of previous war poetry (particularly from the American Civil War and the Great War). Fighting his corner, Oostdijk is also convincing when it comes to giving reasons why American poetry of the war has been neglected, and he is not averse to attacking Modernism or New Criticism on behalf of his charges. The thoroughness and detail of Oostdijk's readings disguise the fact that, on the sly, his is a profoundly polemical study. It points out, for example, that his poets often 'contradict the American victory narrative'---which is a key reason for their neglect. Oostdijk quotes Michael C C Adams, author of the bitterly-titled history, The Best War Ever: America and World War II: '[the war] has been converted over time from a complex, problematic event, full of nuance and debatable meaning, to a simple, shining legend of the Good War.' Oostdijk's poets undermine that legend, and in doing so, their fate has been to go unheard. Thanks to Oostdijk's attention, the time has come to reassess their achievement and their legacy.

Charles Sorley: '"When you see millions of the mouthless dead"'

2011-10-12T08:07:00.012+01:00

Tomorrow sees the anniversary of Charles Sorley's death. He was killed on 13 October 1915 while leading his men at the Battle of Loos. He was twenty years old.

Many memorial volumes of verse appeared during the War, assembled by grieving parents or friends. Whatever their value as commemorative documents, most have no aesthetic merit. Sorley's is the greatest exception. His father, the eminent philosopher William Ritchie Sorley, arranged for the publication of Marlborough, and other poems soon after his son's death, and it appeared early in 1916. The book sold well, going through several editions. (The fourth, to which I have linked, is the most valuable because it contains some of Sorley's prose and his father's annotations.) Among its admirers was Robert Graves, who told Eddie Marsh that Sorley 'seems to have been one so entirely after my own heart in his loves and hates, besides having been just my own age and having spent the same years at Marlboro' as I spent at Ch'house.' Graves would later write that Sorley was one of the three significant poets to have been killed in the War, the others being Rosenberg and Owen.

As its title suggests, Marlborough, and other poems consists mostly of schoolboy verse. Usually, there would be little need to dwell on the juvenilia, but in Sorley's case it is extraordinarily accomplished. A poem like 'The Song of the Ungirt Runners' may take an unpromising subject---it is a celebration of cross-country running at school---but the sure-footed war poet of 'All the Hills and Vales Along' is already audible in the rhythms.

One consequence of the volume's success was that it created a market for a collection of Sorley's correspondence. This appeared in 1919, and can be read in its entirety here. Sorley was as gifted a letter-writter as he was a poet. His correspondence tells how, on a walking tour in Germany at the outbreak of War, he had been arrested and briefly incarcerated. On his return, he enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment, believing the War to be a tragic but necessary evil. As a lover of German culture and people, he justified his involvement by arguing that Germany needed to be defeated for its own good:

But isn't all this bloody? I am full of mute and burning rage and annoyance and sulkiness about it. I could wager that out of twelve million eventual combatants there aren't twelve who really want it. And 'serving one's country' is so unpicturesque and unheroic when it comes to the point. Spending a year in a beastly Territorial camp guarding telegraph wires has nothing poetical about it: nor very useful as far as I can see. Besides the Germans are so nice; but I suppose the best thing that could happen to them would be their defeat.

Found among Sorley's possessions after his death was a pencil manuscript of what has become his most famous poem, '"When you see millions of the mouthless dead"'. Line 10, 'Yet many a better one has died before', is an allusion to Achilles’ response in Iliad 21.107 when the Trojan prince Lycaon begs him for mercy: ‘Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you’ [Fagles’ translation]. In a letter of 28 November 1914, Sorley proposed that the line 'should be read at the grave of every corpse in addition to the burial service', and went on to argue that that 'no saner and splendider comment on death has been made, especially, as here, where it seemed a cruel waste'.

'When you see millions of the mouthless dead'

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, 'They are dead.' Then add thereto,
'Yet many a better one has died before.'
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Downton Abbey, White Feathers, Misogyny

2011-09-20T11:03:00.012+01:00

I have never watched Downton Abbey, but I was fascinated to read the reaction of one Telegraph reviewer to last Sunday's episode, in which a woman of the White Feather Campaign handed feathers to men who hadn't enlisted. Michael Deacon, the reviewer in question, argues that soldiers did not share that resentment, and (courtesy of two misogynistic moments from Owen and Sassoon) that they directed their anger more often at women. His case is problematic.

1. For reasons to do with class, education, sexual orientation and politics, Owen and Sassoon were hardly typical of the soldiers in the trenches, and not even typical of the soldier-poets.

2. I suspect that most women were opposed to the actions of the feather girls (see below); and it's undoubtedly true that the White Feather campaign has been criticised out of all proportion to its numbers of participants. Like Jessie Pope, it is a strategically useful target.

3. It seems odd (to put it kindly) to try to win an argument by uncritically recruiting misogynistic comments for support. Deacon assumes, purely on the basis of two quotations hostile to women, that the soldiers did not object to their able-bodied counterparts' refusals to fight. For every poem which Deacon can find attacking women, I guarantee I can show him twice as many poems by soldier-poets attacking pacifists.

4. Deacon claims that the feather girls shared 'the delusion' that the Great War was 'some glorious game'. On the contrary, they understood exactly what was at stake, which was why they were prepared to shame men into enlisting. We may disapprove of their methods, but for them the War was no game.

Many of the comments below Deacon's article slip into misogyny. Many more of them restate the old and now discredited view of the War as futile and unnecessary. It will be interesting to see how media organisations like the BBC talk about the War during the centenary years, because it looks like the historians have not managed to make much headway so far.

Here is Helen Hamilton's wartime assault on the white feather brigade. As poetry, it's terrible; but as social commentary it is satisfyingly robust.

The Jingo-Woman

Jingo-woman
(How I dislike you!)
Dealer in white feathers,
Insulter, self-appointed,
Of all the men you meet,
Not dressed in uniform,
When to your mind,
    A sorry mind),
    They should be,
    The test
The judgment of your eye,
That wild, infuriate eye,
Whose glance, so you declare,
    Reveals unerringly,
Who's good for military service.
Oh! exasperating woman,
I'd like to wring your neck,
    I really would!
    You make all women seem such duffers!
    Besides exemptions,
    Enforced and held reluctantly,
    ---Not that you'll believe it---
    You must know surely
Men there are, and young men too,
Physically not fit to serve,
Who look in their civilian garb
    Quite stout and hearty.
And most of whom, I'll wager,
Have been rejected several times.
How keen, though, your delight,
    Keen and malignant,
Should one offer you his seat,
    In crowded bus or train,
Thus giving you the chance to say,
In cold, incisive tones of scorn:
    'No I much prefer to stand
    As you, young man, are not in khaki!'
Heavens! I wonder you're alive!
    Oh, these men,
These twice-insulted men,
    What iron self-control they show,
    What wonderful forbearance!

But still the day may come
For you to prove yourself
As sacrificial as upbraiding.
So far they are not taking us
But if the war goes on much longer
    They might,
    Nay more,
    They must,
When the last man has gone.
And if and when that dark day dawns,
You'll join up first, of course,
Without waiting to be fetched.
But in the meantime,
Do hold your tongue!
You shame us women.
Can't you see it isn't decent,
To flout and goad men into doing,
    What is not asked of you?

Golding and War

2011-09-14T13:32:00.004+01:00

Next Monday, 19 September 2011, is the centenary of William Golding's birth. Together with my colleague Adeline Johns-Putra, I am organising the centenary conference in Cornwall (Golding's native county) this weekend. If you are lucky enough to be in the Duchy with time on your hands, come along to one of the plenaries: Golding's daughter, Judy, will be speaking at 3pm on Friday 16 September, and John Carey at 11am on Sunday 18th. The venue for both talks is the Chapel Lecture Theatre in Tremough House on the University of Exeter's Cornwall Campus.

Before anyone asks what this has to do with war poetry, let me explain that Golding started his writing career as a poet (if you find his pamphlet in a second-hand shop, I will buy it from you for a tenner), and he later wrote a great deal about the Second World War. To prove the point, my own talk at the conference is titled 'Golding and War'.

Congratulations to P J Harvey!

2011-09-09T20:10:00.007+01:00

P J Harvey won the Mercury Prize this week for Let England Shake. She is a native of West Dorset, and recorded the war-shadowed album in the beautiful village of Eype, a short journey along the Jurassic Coast from where I live. Here (below, from 0:10 onwards) is one from the archive: Harvey's superb performance of Kurt Weill's anti-war song, 'Ballad of the Soldier's Wife'.

Events: Gurney, Dymock, Great War Poetry

2011-09-07T09:51:00.006+01:00

This Saturday, 10 September, at 4pm in LT1 of the Queen's Building, University of Exeter, the Convocation Lecture will be devoted to the works of Ivor Gurney. I will be reading unpublished poems, and Philip Lancaster and Helen Jones Johnson will be performing the world premiere of several of Gurney's songs. All are welcome, but please book in advance.

The Friends of the Dymock Poets will hold their AGM weekend on 1-2 October 2011 at Colwall Village Hall. On Saturday, Tim Brewis will speak on Edward Thomas, Peter Howarth on Eddie Marsh, and Jon Stallworthy on Gurney, Owen, Rosenberg and Thomas. The following day, there will be a literary walk around Bosbury, and in the Great Hall of Malvern College, a performance of some more songs by Gurney.

Finally, a date for your diaries. The English Association's Centenary Conference of the Poetry of the Great War, organised by yours truly, will be taking place in Oxford three years from today. The relevant poetry societies will all be participating. To see more details as they become available, keep reading this blog, or look here.

Harry Ricketts: Strange Meetings

2011-08-31T13:31:00.001+01:00

Strange Meetings, by Harry Ricketts, was part of my holiday reading this summer. My expectations were low, the reviews having been lukewarm. Such praise as the book attracted had been hedged with caveats and cavils. And I hadn't yet seen the Friends of the Dymock Poets Newsletter which was awaiting my return to England: in a long article, Lynn Parker was so perplexed by this 'ingenious but infuriating book' that she wondered 'how it came to be commissioned'.

It is possible to acknowledge the justice of the criticisms while still celebrating the book's achievement. Admittedly, some of the selections and omissions seem bizarre. A study which is structured around meetings between war poets ought not to devote a chapter to imaginary conversations between Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas; the occlusion of the Dymock Poets---even to the point of claiming (wrongly) that the Frosts and Thomases had 'holidayed' together in the 'West Midlands'---is a crude strategy to hide distracting stories from view; there is virtually no analysis of poetry, and what little that survives is untrustworthy (for example, Ricketts argues that the 'enemy soldier' of Owen's 'Strange Meeting' had not only been killed by the speaker, but had 'also killed him'); perhaps at the publisher's insistence, a single woman poet (Vera Brittain) has been accommodated, although she breaks all the book's principles of focusing exclusively on soldier poets, and is barely a poet at all; the canard that Gurney was homosexual, based on nothing more than a horrible misreading of 'To His Love', is cited uncritically; photographs are included which have no bearing on the book's subject; poets who were not part of prestigious literary networks receive less attention than they deserve. And so on.

Yet in one respect, reviewers have seemed disingenuous. Several have claimed that the book merely repackages familiar stories. Either those reviewers are more knowledgeable than me, or they are bluffing. Some relationships, especially between Sassoon and Owen, seem like roads well trodden, but many others (such as Nichols and Sassoon, or Thomas and Brooke) are insufficiently known or studied. Ricketts writes refreshingly about all his subjects, but the polish of his prose should not disguise his thorough research. This may not be a book for an academic market, but it has things to teach all its readers.

The heroes of Ricketts' study are Brooke and Sassoon. They loom large, partly because they knew more poets than the others, and partly (I suspect) because Ricketts values their work so highly. (A third and less predictable hero is Robert Nichols, whose Ardours and Endurances, now entirely forgotten, was 'the poetic hit' of 1917.) Brooke appears as a force of nature: Ricketts quotes Virginia Woolf's account of the skinny-dipping poet who dives into a pool at Grantchester and surfaces with 'an instant erection'. No study of First World War poetry makes sense without Brooke, whose influence on his successors was incalculable. Loved or loathed, his five war sonnets could not be escaped: what Ricketts calls Ivor Gurney's 'complicated mixture of tribute and riposte' was repeated in the works of almost all the War's significant poets.

This fact points towards the most valuable aspect of Ricketts' work. He illustrates, entertainingly and sensitively, the extraordinary extent to which the war poets were reading each other, virtually from the start. Their personal relationships are merely props for the more important and intimate relationship between their works. So Ricketts is right, for example, to devote a chapter to the 'strange meeting' between Brooke and Gurney, even though the two men never actually met; Gurney's encounter with Brooke's poetry inspired some of his finest work. Biographies matter because they help us to appreciate the profound indebtedness even of such astonishing originality as Gurney's.

Light Verse of the First World War

2011-08-12T20:18:00.007+01:00

Vivien Noakes, who died in February this year, was one of the best editors of her generation. Her variorum edition of Isaac Rosenberg's poems and plays is a model of good textual practice, and her anthology Voices of Silence revivified the canon of First World War poetry by focusing on the work of 'less gifted writers' who created 'a body of rich, exciting, often deeply moving work that complements the established literary canon'. Some of her poets risk being undersold even by that description---Borden, Gibson, Cannan, Service, and one or two others were significant poets who ought to appear in any anthology of the War. What is most striking about Noakes's 'alternative' anthology, compared with competitors which are marketed as mainstream, is the amount of light verse included in it. So inured are we to the horrors of the battlefield that we can hardly allow soldiers to have been cracking jokes, or writing limericks, or singing bawdy songs on the Western Front. Comedy and light verse have been squeezed out of the canon because they unsettle our prejudices about what the War was like. One of Noakes's greatest contributions in Voices of Silence is to insist the comedy was central to the soldiers' experiences.

I had only come across Edward de Stein's work once before. He has a short and unexceptional poem in Brian Gardner's Up the Line to Death. Gardner also quotes de Stein's account of 'the perpetual sense of the ridiculous which, even under the most appalling conditions, never seemed to desert the men with whom I was privileged to serve, and which indeed seemed to flourish more freely in the mud and rain of the front line than in the comparative comfort of billets.' Nothing of that is conveyed by the poem in Gardner's anthology, but Noakes selects more generously and wisely. I particularly enjoyed de Stein's 'The Romance of Place-Names', which first appeared in Punch a month before the end of the War.

The Romance of Place-Names
('Many of the names now given to places in the battle-area will survive the war', Daily Paper. This should give a great chance to the Picardy poet of the future.)

The leafy glades of 'Maida Vale'
     Are bright with bursting may,
And daffodils and violets pale
     Bedew 'The Milky Way';
There's perfect peace in 'Regent Street',
     In 'Holborn' rural charm,
But nowhere smells the Spring so sweet
     As down by 'Stinking Farm'.

As I rode through 'Dead Cow Lane',
     Beneath the dungeon keep
Of 'Wobbly House' that tops the plain,
     I saw a maiden peep;
Her glance was like the dappled doe's,
     She blushed with shy alarm,
As pink as any Rambler-rose
     That climbs at 'Stinking Farm'.

O maiden, if it be my fate
     To win so great a boon,
At 'Hell-fire Corner' I will wait
     Beneath the silver moon;
I'll swear no maid but thee I know
     As softly arm-in-arm
Along the 'Blarney Road' we go
     That leads to 'Stinking Farm'.

And we will wander, O my Queen,
     By many a mossy nook,
Where limpid waters flow between
     The banks of 'Beery Brook';
In 'Purgatory' we will roam
     Where blow the breezes warm,
If thou wilt come and make thy home,
     O sweet, at 'Stinking Farm'.

Robert Frost, Scotland and England

2011-07-19T09:43:00.017+01:00

I am currently writing on 'Frost and the First World War' for Frost in Context, a volume of essays for Cambridge UP edited by Mark Richardson (whose blog I heartily recommend). It is a large topic to cram into 3000 words.

Frost uses the exclusive term 'England' to describe the nation at war. This would be less surprising were it not for his own pedigree. Frost was proud of his Scottish ancestry, his mother having emigrated from Edinburgh to the States aged twelve. Correcting the impression in 1917 that he was a 'Yankee realist', Frost insisted that it would be more accurate to think of him as a 'Scotch symbolist'. He also referred to his 'Scotch-Yankee calculation': the hybrid identity lingered despite his never having spent more than a few weeks in the maternal homeland. (As an Englishman, I would never dream of suggesting that Frost was the great Scottish poet of the last century.) Yet in February 1915, on the point of returning to the States after two and a half years in England, Frost wrote a farewell note to Harold Monro in which he declared loftily that 'England has become half my native land — England the victorious'. If England is one half, it is safe to assume that America, not Scotland, comprises the other.

Foregoing his Scottish lineage, and ignoring or unaware of Monro’s, Frost seems to have slipped readily into a discourse of Englishness. This was not simply a performance for particular correspondents. A wartime notebook entry, complete with faulty syntax, reads as follows:

If it is sweet to Englishmen that England though a little island north away should half the lands and all the seas and make them better for her righteousness, why should not Germany wish such glory for their country in return? Wish it? Yes. And ask England for it if she dares. But why should not England deny her request?

England is not 'a little island' unless (as seems to have been the case here) it has subsumed Scotland and Wales. The word 'sweet' immediately evokes Horace's 'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori', and situates Frost's 'England' in a myth of self-sacrifice. Frost had met Rupert Brooke, whose sonnet 'The Soldier' had done so much to popularise that myth: it referred to 'England' four times, and 'English' twice. That the myth of England should have infiltrated even the work of a sceptical Scottish Yankee like Frost is proof of its pervasive appeal.

A. E. Housman: 'I did not lose my heart in summer's even'

2011-07-09T21:26:00.010+01:00

Robert Frost once stated that his object in life was to unite his avocation and his vocation. Most literary scholars have entered the profession with exactly that ambition, although a small but growing number---pithily described by Harold Bloom as 'the School of Resentment'---seem not to enjoy literature very much. I have learnt most from those scholars who are also appreciators, combining the professional's depth of expertise with the passion of the hobbyist.

Archie Burnett's edition of The Poems of A. E. Housman has, in all the positive senses, something of a philatelist's enthusiasm. It lists its ambitions as follows: 'to print all of A. E. Housman's verse; to elucidate and correct the text of the verse published posthumously; to record textual variants from manuscript and printed sources; and to provide a commentary on each poem.' That sounds dryasdust, but the book is a marvel of editorial tact. It tells readers everything they may reasonably want to know, but only if they want to know it. The apparatus knows itself to be secondary to Housman's poems, which are loved and trusted enough to speak for themselves. Frost wrote that poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom. This edition brings delight and wisdom together.

I never need an excuse to read Housman, but lately I have been studying Burnett's scholarship for two reasons: it provides an exemplar for the three-volume edition of Ivor Gurney's writings which I am co-editing with Philip Lancaster; and I have been trying to determine which of Housman's poems can properly be included in an anthology of Great War poetry which I am compiling. About 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries' there can be no doubt: Housman claims to have written it in September 1917, and it was published in The Times on the last day of October that year. 'Here dead lie we', on the other hand, is an imposter. Brian Gardner includes it in Up the Line to Death, but wrongly: Burnett's detective work has shown that the poem dates from the mid- to late-1890s. 'Here dead lie we' also provides an instructive example of why scholarly editions are needed now more than ever. Google 'Here dead we lie' and 'Here dead lie we', and see which one produces the most results.

I had been hoping for more luck with 'I did not lose my heart in summer's even' (below), first published posthumously in More Poems (1936). It does not rank among Housman's best, but deserves attention as another of a small group of poems about killing. Like Sassoon's 'The Kiss', it recognises a homoerotic impulse in the physical act of penetrating the enemy body. Each man loves the thing he kills. But is it a First World War poem? Even Burnett's scrutiny cannot provide an unambiguous answer: 'Draft, c.1900-Sept. 1917, possibly c.1900-5, but not Oct. 1910-Oct. 1912; fair copy, after Jan. 1925.' Unfortunately, in the absence of new evidence, the poem does not belong in an anthology of Great War poetry.

I did not lose my heart in summer's even,
  When roses to the moonrise burst apart:
When plumes were under heel and lead was flying,
  In blood and smoke and flame I lost my heart.

I lost it to a soldier and a foeman,
  A chap that did not kill me, but he tried;
That took the sabre straight and took it striking
  And laughed and kissed his hand to me and died.

Charlotte Mew: 'May, 1915'

2011-07-05T09:03:00.004+01:00

Last weekend, I attended the Decadent Poetics conference in Exeter, and gave a talk on one of my favourite poets, Charlotte Mew. Mew seems to me to be scandalously underappreciated. Hers is a narrow achievement---only one book appeared during her lifetime---but at her best she bears comparison with any of her contemporaries. I am currently writing an essay on her work for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, and will enthusiastically accept any further invitation to proselytise on her behalf.

Mew's poetry is one of the few redeeming features of Scars Upon My Heart, an anthology of 'women's poetry and verse of the First World War' which eschews value judgement in favour of inclusivity. Mew and the other significant poets collected there (Cannan, Cole, Farjeon, Meynell) almost disappear beneath waves of mediocrity. Thankfully, the anthology prints all three of Mew's poems explicitly addressing the War. The best known is 'The Cenotaph', which I have previously discussed here. There are also two shorter poems: 'May, 1915' and 'June, 1915'. Here is 'May, 1915' as edited by John Newton in the most reliable edition of Mew's poetry.

May, 1915

    Let us remember Spring will come again
    To the scorched, blackened woods, where all the wounded trees
    Wait, with their old wise patience for the heavenly rain,
  Sure of the sky: sure of the sea to send its healing breeze,
      Sure of the sun. And even as to these
        Surely the Spring, when God shall please
      Will come again like a divine surprise
To those who sit to-day with their great Dead, hands in their hands, eyes in their eyes,
At one with Love, at one with Grief: blind to the scattered things and changing skies.

I have argued elsewhere that this is a poem fractured across its middle. The first four and a half lines may require a willed act of remembrance in order to assert the therapeutic powers of seasonal cycles, but the emphasis remains positive: no matter how badly damaged, nature will recover in time. The problem occurs in the second half of the poem, when the speaker wants to draw parallels between the patient trees and the mourning relatives of the Great War's dead. 'And even as to these': the awkwardness of the phrase is an acknowledgement that the simile remains problematic. That is followed by more special pleading (or wishful thinking) in the word 'Surely': the switch from the confidence of the thrice-repeated 'Sure' to 'Surely' betrays scepticism more than faith. By May 1915, 'Love' and 'Grief' have become synonymous, expanding as the lines expand, and blinding the bereaved even to the divinely ordained Spring and its supposed healing qualities.

War Poetry and the Blogs

2011-06-21T12:59:00.007+01:00

George Simmers reports here the appeal by the Rupert Brooke society to raise enough money to buy a painting by Brooke's inamorata (well, one of them), Phyllis Gardner (far left). And, here, George picks up on my blogpost denouncing the AQA GCSE syllabus , this time to point out that its prose is as bad as its poetry: 'The AQA policy seems to be that teenagers should be protected from difficult, troubling literature.' We can't have impressionable minds subjected to Kipling's sadistic masterpiece, 'Mary Postgate'.

Gists and Piths I discovered relatively recently. Here it is on Bernard Bergonzi and war poetry, here on books by Nicholas Murray and Harry Ricketts, here on Daniel Swift's Bomber County, here on Ted Hughes's 'Griefs for Dead Soldiers', and here on 'the trouble with war poetry'.

English Association: Poetry of the Great War

2011-06-16T13:10:00.005+01:00

The English Association has recently established a Special Interest Group on Poetry of the Great War, to be overseen by yours truly. We will be planning a number of events as the centenary of the outbreak of the War approaches.

War Anthologies ---- National v. International

2011-06-12T09:11:00.005+01:00

Last month I attended a symposium in Amsterdam on 'Poetry and the Unpoetic'. It was a wonderful event, despite its regular focus on poets I had never read or even heard of. My own talk on Robert Frost examined his ability to incorporate speech rhythms into blank verse.

At the conference I met Geert Buelens, who has edited a vast international anthology of First World War poetry. Het lijf in slijk geplant [The body planted in mud] runs to nearly 700 pages; it contains poems from 40 nations, in thirty different languages. All poems appear in the original and are translated into Dutch on the facing page. I cannot comment on the merits of the introduction because it, too, is in Dutch, and my language skills only extend to Latin and a little nervous French.

I came away with the feeling that Geert did not entirely approve of my project to edit an anthology of British First World War poetry for Oxford World's Classics. Often, a polyglot's disdain is deserved, and the particular case for the prosecution against my anthology is also bolstered by another understandable reaction: hasn't it been done many times before? Yet there are powerful reasons why anthologies of war poetry should be sequestered along linguistic and even national lines.

Some of those reasons are to do with war, and some are to do with poetry. War, by its nature, obliges us urgently to think about nationhood, nation-building and nation-defending. This is even true of civil war, when a nation turns against itself to decide between competing arguments about national identity. All such arguments being rooted in perceptions of the past, war also encourages poets to engage with, resist, revise and enhance existing national traditions. To a foreign eye, those engagements may prove puzzling. This is not to deny the value of a comparative approach, by which a French poet at Verdun might share many of the cultural attitudes of the German poet whom he is trying to kill. (For that matter, think of Jules et Jim.) But although those cultural attitudes may inform his poetry, if he is a gifted writer they are never what is most valuable about his poetry. All of which brings me back to Robert Frost, and his dictum that 'Poetry is what gets lost in translation'.

Having made a hurried case for my own project, I must confess that Geert's book is extraordinarily impressive in its scope. Even so, if the anglophone poems are isolated, they comprise a curious canon. Geert has divided his book year-by-year, and the anglophone poems occur as follows:

1914: Rudyard Kipling, 'For All We Have and Are'; Lawrence [sic] Binyon, 'For the Fallen'; Rabindranath Tagore, 'The trumpet lies in the dust'; Jessie Pope, 'No!'; Rupert Brooke, 'Peace'.

1915: Charles Sorley, 'To Germany' and 'All the Hills and Vales' [sic]; John McCrae, 'In Flanders Fields'; Siegfried Sassoon, 'Absolution'; Charles Sorley, 'When you see millions of the mouthless dead'.

1916: Rustam B. Paymaster, 'Ancient and Modern Warfare'; Charles Wood, 'National Anthem'; Isaac Rosenberg, 'Break of Day in the Trenches'.

1917: Ivor Gurney, 'Servitude'; Francis Ledwidge, 'Soliloquy'; Wallace Stevens, 'Life contracts and death is expected'; Wilfred Owen, 'Dulce et Decorum Est'; Carl Sandburg, 'The Four Brothers'; Isaac Rosenberg, 'The Immortals'.

1918: W. B. Yeats, 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'; Siegfried Sassoon, 'Suicide in the Trenches'; Lucian B. Watkins, 'The Negro Soldiers of America: What We Are Fighting For'; Wilfred Owen, 'The Sentry'.

A short post-war sample includes fragments from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and The Waste Land.

The more inclusive a book attempts to be, the more conspicuous its omissions. Notable omissions are Owen's 'Strange Meeting' and 'Futility', Sassoon's 'Everyone Sang', Kipling's 'Epitaphs of the War', Mew's 'The Cenotaph', all of Hardy's war poetry, Frost again, Blunden, Graves, David Jones, Housman, Lawrence, and the entire Antipodean contribution to the war.

Het Lijf in slijk geplant is a brilliantly ambitious book, and I wish that there were an English equivalent. But it cannot supplant detailed selections from individual poets, groups of poets, and most importantly of all, nations of poets. We need both national and international anthologies if we are fully to appreciate the poetry of the First World War, and those anthologies must always be challenged and remade as each generation addresses the prejudices and blindnesses of the last.

The AQA GCSE English---Does It 'Teach Anything Meaningful'?

2011-06-06T07:58:00.018+01:00

Some traffic has come to this site lately, looking for analysis of Jane Weir's 'Poppies'. Not wanting to disappoint my readers (see the final paragraphs below), and having a vague recollection that I had read the poem somewhere before, I looked it up. All was revealed: 'Poppies' is included in an anthology which is part of the AQA GCSE English syllabus.

I sat my O level English Literature exam in 1985. The selected texts were Julius Caesar and The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, which we studied deeply and painstakingly. Unfortunately, that was a long time ago. Nowadays, even undergraduates are protected from Chaucer, either by avoiding him altogether or by reading him in editions with modernised spelling. It is doubtful that students have become less intelligent during the intervening decades. Yet the level of challenge has dropped steadily, in inverse proportion to the number of students achieving the highest grades.

It is worth remembering that the GCSE syllabus is not created with the wishes of university professors paramount, nor should it be. Most students who take English at GCSE will not go on to study English Literature at A level; most who study it at A level will not read English at university. All the more reason, then, that the 16-year-olds who end up studying sciences or some different area of the humanities, or leaving school and getting a job, should have been exposed during their education to a profound engagement with the finest literature which our language has to offer.

Which brings me, by force of negative example, to the AQA poetry anthology which goes by the moody title Moon on the Tides. The poems, we are told, 'have been chosen by teachers and examiners to appeal to a range of students. They range from classic texts to brand new, previously unpublished poems from popular contemporary writers.' Do not mistake 'classic' for 'classical'---the overwhelming majority of poems are contemporary, and only 10 come from before 1900; just one (Shakespeare's sonnet 116) is pre-Romantic. The recommended task for that sonnet---no I'm not making this up---is to consider the following question: 'Does the poem tell us anything meaningful or is it just "an exercise in poetic cleverness"?'

That question is not posed of more obviously relevant (i.e. contemporary) poems, among which can be found the good, the bad and the downright terrible. At some point in the early 1990s some government committee must have decided that Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy were the appropriate poets to inflict on the nation's youth: they are here represented by 6 poems and 3 poems respectively, while minor poets like Hardy, Heaney and Yeats must make do with one, and Auden, Douglas and Hill don't appear at all.

The poems are divided into 'clusters', each cluster having been 'arranged by themes that have been chosen because they address universal and timeless issues'. One such cluster is titled 'Conflict', and here is where Jane Weir's 'Poppies' can be found alongside thirteen other poems. The selection is, to be kind, utterly bizarre. It includes a so-so poem by e.e. cummings, although it remains unclear which out of the 'English, Welsh [or] Irish Literary Heritage' his work is meant to represent. (There is no Eliot, no Plath, no Bishop, no Stevens, no Frost, no Lowell, no Moore, no Crane, no Berryman---but at least we have e.e. cummings!). Great War poets are represented solely by Owen's 'Futility' and Margaret Postgate Cole's 'The Falling Leaves'. Ted Hughes's 'Bayonet Charge', written early in his career before he realised that there was no future in trying to out-Owen Owen, takes up room which might have been given to Rosenberg, Sassoon or Gurney.

And then there is 'Poppies', by Jane Weir, in relation to which students are encouraged by the AQA to 'consider some statistics from recent conflicts'. Click on the link to read it. I confess that I have read no other poems by Jane Weir, so it may be that she is a fantastic poet. 'Poppies', however, is irredeemably poor. Ezra Pound famously stated that 'A poem should be at least as well written as prose'. But imagine reading this in a novel: 'I was brave, as I walked with you, to the front door, threw it open, the world overflowing like a treasure chest.' Or this: 'Before you left, I pinned [a poppy] onto your lapel, crimped petals, spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade of yellow bias binding around your blazer.' Even as prose, it seems clunky, especially in its habitual recourse to asyndeton. The metaphors trip each other up. Take this one: 'All my words / flattened, rolled, turned into felt, // slowly melting'. If the words are flattening, wouldn't that stop any rolling? Are they turning into felt and then melting, or are they melting into the form of felt? And what is the felt all about anyway? Or take the dove (Please, somebody, take the dove!): who would have guessed that that particular bird would appear? And, as it flies out of its pear tree, are we meant to wonder why the first two days of Christmas are prominently muddled in a poem set just before Remembrance Sunday? As a last example: the poem's speaker describes leaning against a war memorial 'like a wishbone'. I have pondered that image long and hard, and can make no sense of it whatsoever. If anyone has any ideas, please post below.

'Poppies' performs all the right gestures: the poppy itself, the dove, the churchyard, the soldier who was once a child, the war memorial at which (inevitably) the inscriptions are 'traced' by the protagonist. It is well-meaning and weak, which makes it perfectly suited for the AQA syllabus.

Forthcoming Events

2011-06-05T08:42:00.002+01:00

The Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship Conference will be held at Stratford-on-Avon on Sunday 10 September.

On Friday 25 November, a symposium will take place in Belfast on Robert Graves and Ireland.

Kate Kennedy will be running a two-day course titled 'Discovering Ivor Gurney' at Madingley Hall, near Cambridge, on 10-12 June.

And here is advance notice of a conference on Hardy's poetry to be held on 7-8 June next year at the University of Artois in Arras. Note the early deadline for submitting proposals.

Kate McLoughlin: Authoring War

2011-06-02T14:31:00.008+01:00

Kate McLoughlin's Authoring War describes itself accurately as 'an ambitious and pioneering study of war writing across all literary genres from earliest times to the present day'. Its scope is astonishing: McLoughlin writes authoritatively about Homer and Heller, Virgil and Vonnegut. She crosses genres and periods sure-footedly, arguing that 'while it is indisputable that all wars are different, it is simultaneously also the case that all wars have certain elements in common: violent death, adverse conditions, the requirement to kill and risk one's own life'.

Her book is the best advocate of her approach, filled as it is with the most unlikely but (it transpires) mutually illuminating case studies. Chapter 1, for example, brings together Gascoigne's The Fruites of Warre, several Shakespeare plays, Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier, poems by Longfellow and Browning, Mary Seacole, and Auden and Isherwood's Journey to a War. There are undoubtedly losses in attempting such a range, because the peculiarities of texts risk being overlooked in favour of their shared characteristics. Even so, those losses are outweighed by McLoughlin's ability to expose common concerns across centuries, genres, languages and nations.

McLoughlin's argument is signalled by her title: what does it mean to 'author' war? To put it another way, what is the consequence of the fact that 'the gap between the experience and the representation of conflict can be narrowed but never completely eliminated'? We might say the same about representations of love, or sex, or eating, or watching television, but McLoughlin's argument places war in a special category because of the extremity of the experience and the ethical challenges which it poses for the artist or reporter. Claiming that 'the First World War's natural form was the lyric poem, that the Second World War's was the epic novel, that the Vietnam War's was the movie, [and] that the Iraq War's may well turn out to be the blog', McLoughlin finds a similar crisis of representation in every genre.

My disagreement with Authoring War has nothing to do with the book's execution: it is impeccably scholarly and well written (albeit with a sporadic penchant for obscure polysyllables), and I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the relationship between war and literature. The book does, though, seek to make tentative claims for war literature as morally improving. 'Can war literature stop war?', McLoughlin wonders in her conclusion. She fears that the answer is negative, although she does concede on the other side that 'war representation can also occasion delight in violence'. The thought makes her uneasy, but the translating of violence into art is always and necessarily bound up with that delight. However various our motivations, one reason for being drawn to war literature is spelt out by David Bromwich in his brilliant commentary on Edmund Burke: we have 'an active and to some degree a delighted interest in scenes of suffering'. Or, as Burke himself puts it: 'I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others; for let the affection be what it will in appearance, if it does not make us shun such objects, if it makes us dwell upon them, in this case I conceive we must have a delight or pleasure of some species or other in contemplating objects of this kind.'

By contrast, McLoughlin's final paragraphs float a number of uplifting arguments. One such is 'that war literature reveals and recommends love'. So it may do, about as often as literature about love discovers within itself an overt or sublimated violence. Authoring War surrenders to sentimentality when it ends by approvingly quoting Carol Ann Duffy's anthology-of-clichés, 'Last Post'. It is a weak conclusion to an extraordinarily impressive book.

Keith Douglas: 'Vergissmeinnicht'

2011-05-11T09:35:00.011+01:00

The best blog for scholarly discussion of poetry is The Era of Casual Fridays. Its attention to what John Hollander has called 'the minute particulars of particular poems and...the great particularities of particular poets' is forensic in breadth and detail. The blog's author, Mark Richardson, has made his reputation as a scholar and editor of Robert Frost, but Emerson, Dickinson, Melville, and Hardy also feature prominently in his canon.

Richardson's latest blogpost considers the use of rhyme in Byron's 'She Walks in Beauty' and three heavily anthologised poems of the Great War: Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' (about which I have already had my say) and Sassoon's 'Base Details' and 'Blighters'. Directly or indirectly, Richardson's arguments about rhyme follow in the tradition of W. K. Wimsatt's classic essay (which you will probably need to access via a university network.) However, I like his distinction between 'conjunctive' and 'disjunctive' rhymes. Our brains seem ready to assume that words which rhyme also have semantic connections, which is why Byron's counter-intuitive rhyme 'Aristotle' / 'bottle' works to such comic effect. Richardson points out other disjunctive rhymes in Owen and Sassoon, such as the macaronic rhyme 'glory' / 'mori'. That is a complicated example, because in another sense the rhyme may be conjunctive after all: the paths of glory lead but to the grave. And maybe, just maybe, death is battle can be glorious, as most war literature through the ages has insisted.

Although Richardson focuses on full rhymes, a related issue concerns the conjunction or disjunction (harmony or disharmony, consonance or dissonance) of sounds in rhyme. When Owen rhymes 'escaped' with 'scooped', 'groined' with 'groaned', he is inventing what Edmund Blunden definitively termed 'pararhyme'. The exam-hall response to Owen's pararhymes---that they are a strategy for jarring and unsettling the reader---is no less true for being a truism. I suspect that a computer with a good ear would discover that war poetry has a disproportionate number of pararhymes, slant rhymes and off-rhymes of one sort or another.

One problem with pararhyme is that it can relax into predictability. In those poems where he pararhymes at all, Owen pararhymes consistently throughout. Keith Douglas, the grateful inheritor of Owen's experimentation, demonstrates how much can be achieved by using different kinds of rhyme unexpectedly.

Vergissmeinnicht

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

This is Owen's 'Strange Meeting' replayed for a more brutal and certainly less conciliatory scene, in which the only tears shed are those of a girlfriend who 'would weep to see' what she will, in fact, never see: pity and voyeuristic fantasy become inseparable. 'Look', commands the living soldier; he takes pleasure in wanting the reader, as well as Steffi, to witness what he has done on our behalf, and to linger over the details. If we refuse the challenge and turn away squeamishly, we are hypocrites. But by looking, we take part in the dishonouring of Steffi's photograph: women have always been a 'spoil' of war, and here she is mercilessly despoiled while the erect machinery mocks her lover's 'decay'. 'Decay' has overtones of detumescence---coming as it does from the Old French decheoir with its implications of falling, weakening, declining. The dead soldier's 'equipment' may be 'hard and good', but his equipment (wink, wink!) will never be hard and good again. Owen's 'Strange Meeting' had ended with enemies befriended and lying down together; Douglas's strange meeting celebrates the continuing potency of the living who laud it sexually over the dead.

Owen invites us to pity; how is Douglas inviting us to feel? If 'Vergissmeinnicht' is, as I believe, one of the greatest lyrics of its century, it is because it discomforts so profoundly. As readers, we never feel assured in our response; we never feel trustful of the speaker's attitudes or intentions. The poem steadfastly refuses to settle into a formal or tonal pattern, its rhymes constantly disconcerting but never becoming predictable. So what sounds initially as if it might reproduce the stanza of In Memoriam---fittingly for a well-behaved elegy of the kind that this turns out not to be---marks its resistance with the slant rhyme 'gone' / 'sun'. A stanza break appears to augur a fresh pattern, but 'gun' / 'on' / 'one' / 'demon' clash amongst themselves and look back to the previous stanza. Eight lines into the poem, and having already encountered pararhyme, slant rhyme and full rhyme, the reader still has no idea of the rules. And so it goes on, with that horrible conjunctive slant rhyme, 'spoil' / 'girl', and a macaronic rhyme of which Owen would be proud: 'Vergissmeinnicht' / 'script'. A poem which can rhyme on 'Vergissmeinnicht' (forget-me-not) is slyly aware that rhyme is itself an act of memory and recall, a repetition-with-variation. What makes Douglas's rhyming powerful is that the variations are themselves so various.

The final stanza contains a feminine rhyme ('mingled' / 'singled') and a pararhyme ('heart' / 'hurt'). In Richardson's terms, 'mingled' and 'singled' are disjunctive: to mingle is to do something like the opposite of 'singl[ing]'. By contrast, 'heart' and 'hurt' go straight to the point, because this is a romantic tragedy in which Steffi has already been imagined broken-hearted. But these chivalric tones are jeering, not respectful: the inversion of 'soldier singled', the lover's 'mortal hurt'---such orotund pronouncements, pumped full of their own afflatus, relish absurdity. What power the living are seen to wield: they can even turn the dead soldier's epitaph into travesty.

Forthcoming Events

2011-03-22T20:58:00.002Z

For English readers of this blog, there are a few forthcoming events which may be of interest. On Friday 1 April, at 7.30 p.m., in the Naas Lane Community Centre in Lydney, Anthony Boden will be giving the first F. W. Harvey Society Annual Lecture. Saturday 9 April sees the Dymock Poets weekend at the Brooms Green Village Hall, including two talks on the inexplicably underrated Wilfrid Gibson. And on Saturday 14 May, at St Andrews Church in Churchdown, Gloucester, the Ivor Gurney Society will be holding its annual spring weekend.

Nicholas Murray: The Red Sweet Wine of Youth

2011-03-17T10:14:00.011Z

Nick Murray is a fantastic poet, a gifted novelist, an authoritative biographer, a small press publisher, and an entertaining blogger. He writes engagingly on Victorian travellers and on Liverpool. Somehow, he also finds time to assess the poetry of the First World War. The Red Sweet Wine of Youth, published by Little, Brown late last year, is a trade book which sits between biography and literary criticism. Murray has not written primarily for specialists, but the thoroughness of his research makes it a valuable resource for all audiences.

The first chapter, 'The West End Front', establishes the state of poetry in the years leading up to 1914. The danger of merely restating the old Georgian versus Modernist division is neatly avoided through the detail of Murray's analysis: he is able to point out the complex networks of allegiance which cut across those caricatures. The following chapters pursue particular poets through the trenches and on to (according to luck) their deaths or their post-war writing careers.

Sassoon and Rosenberg earn their own chapters; everyone else must share. Whether this implies a value judgement is unclear, although Murray evidently shares my high regard for Gurney and Jones. The least persuasive section of the book, I thought, was the section on Owen, who is obliged to keep company with Robert Graves (Sassoon would have been the more obvious and more logical choice), and whose history seems too familiar for Murray to bring it to life. Given the book's resistance to traditional accounts of the war as a descent from mindless innocence to bitter experience, I wonder whether Murray's enthusiasm is soured by reservations about the ways in which Owen's work has been put to use in classrooms and public debates? Aside from that, the most hostile criticism I can throw at the book is that it misspells Lascelles Abercrombie on one occasion, and that it doesn't know how to set out poetry quotations which start mid-line.

This is an important study, particularly because it will lead many readers to explore lesser-known figures like Hulme and Grenfell. It also finesses public perception of the war and the attitudes of its poets. As Murray states in his introduction, 'It is the argument of this book that the British poets of the First World War were not anti-war but "anti-heroic".' That grasps a crucial distinction which needs to be repeated with increasing urgency as we approach the centenary of the War's outbreak.

Rudyard Kipling: 'The Changelings'

2011-03-03T14:00:00.012Z

Rudyard Kipling, let it be said again, is the finest short story writer in English. At least, I haven't read a better. Much as I adore the plotted viciousness of The Jungle Books, my favourite collection is Debits and Credits (1926), which comes late enough in Kipling's career to be classified as---in Edmund Wilson's pointed phrase---'the Kipling that nobody read'. Although the book contains several masterpieces which regularly appear in selections from Kipling's work (most notably, 'The Wish House', 'The Bull that Thought', 'The Eye of Allah'), it has fallen out of print for long periods. The neglect is incomprehensible. Debits and Credits is the work of a Prospero-figure, abjuring his powers at their height, seeking forgiveness for himself and for a ruined world.

To call Debits and Credits a book of short stories is to do it a disservice. The fourteen stories are held together (and kept apart) by poems which commentate obliquely or directly on the themes of the prose. 'Sea Constables', for example, is a merciless tale of maritime revenge against 'Uncle Newt' --- war-profiteering neutrals being more offensive even than an honest enemy --- and it is preceded by Kipling's poem, 'The Changelings'.

The Changelings

Or ever the battered liners sank
   With their passengers to the dark,
I was head of a Walworth Bank,
   And you were a grocer's clerk.

I was a dealer in stocks and shares,
   And you in butters and teas,
And we both abandoned our own affairs
   And took to the dreadful seas.

Wet and worry about our ways---
   Panic, onset, and flight---
Had us in charge for a thousand days
   And a thousand-year-long night.

We saw more than the nights could hide---
   More than the waves could keep---
And---certain faces over the side
   Which do not go from our sleep.

We were more tired than words can tell
   While the pied craft fled by,
And the swinging mounds of the Western swell
   Hoisted us Heavens-high...

Now there is nothing---not even our rank---
   To witness what we have been;
And I am returned to my Walworth bank,
   And you to your margarine!

This is light verse of the darkest kind. Its rhythms are a variation on the ballad stanza --- four beats followed by three --- but their jauntiness disguises intimate dangers. How easy to read that final line as a joking pay-off, as if the speaker were to be believed that the horrors of war can be pushed away and a banal diurnal career resumed. Everything in the poem resists that paraphrasable meaning. Even the final exclamation mark manages to betray anxiety.

During the Boer War, Kipling had written of the difficulties faced by soldiers returning to civilian life. The irregulars come home to a petty, prissy nation, with its ''ouses both sides of the street'. In this context, there can be nothing pettier than a career in 'margarine'. For all that the banker and grocer are traumatised by memory of---a horrible euphemism---'more than the waves could keep', they continue to hanker for 'what they have been'. As the poem title reminds us, they have changed and cannot go back to their previous lives. Could it be that the trauma of naval warfare is outstripped by the greater trauma of trying to resume the trite rigmarole of civilian existence?

New Publications

2011-02-12T10:23:00.002Z

Having been hibernating for long enough, I return refreshed and in need of catching up with two recent publications. I will say more about both in the coming weeks, but in the meantime let me strongly recommend Nicholas Murray's The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: The Brave and Brief Lives of the War Poets (Little, Brown) and Kate McLoughlin's Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (Cambridge UP).

In other news, the Ivor Gurney Society has a fine new website, courtesy of the indefatigable Philip Lancaster. More resources will be added as the site develops.

Thomas Hardy, 'Christmas: 1924'

2010-12-20T19:38:00.011Z

Thomas Hardy rarely missed an opportunity to express his disappointment with Christianity. War, in particular, prompted him to consider the failure of religion to act as any sort of civilising influence. A dead soldier, speaking from the battlefields of the Boer War, had complained in Hardy's 'A Christmas Ghost Story' (1899) that the 'cause for which [Christ] died' seemed to have been ruled as 'inept, and set aside'. Around the same time, Hardy told a 'religious man' that 'We the civilized world have given Christianity a fair trial for nearly 2000 years, & it has not yet taught countries the rudimentary virtue of keeping peace.'

The consistency of Hardy's thinking on this problem is measured several decades later when, in what would be his final book of poems, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres, he included a sour little epigram.

Christmas: 1924

'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.

Bizarrely, the BBC has a furrow-browed Jack Dee looking at war memorials and images of 'Victims of War' before reciting the poem. By ending with an image of Mother and Child, and the solacing candles, the clip finds comfort in the very source which Hardy's poem had bitterly rejected.

Jessie Pope: 'War Girls'

2010-11-27T15:45:00.006Z

'I suppose that of all the victims of the War', writes George Simmers, 'the one we should be sorriest for is Jessie Pope.' As a marker of A level exam scripts, George is well placed to report on the opprobrium directed at that most convenient of scapegoats. Never mind that Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' makes no mention of Jessie Pope. The best-known fact about the poem is that its earliest draft was ironically dedicated to her. Why this piece of apparently arcane information should be so widely emphasised is a question which ought to give us pause. Not wanting to be implicated by Owen's indictment, we hastily reinstate the dedication so that we can safely remain as disapproving judge and jury. If Owen is accusing Jessie Pope, he can't be accusing us.

Pope was no poet, but she wrote fairly accomplished verse. 'War Girls' shows her at her best:

War Girls

There's the girl who clips your ticket for the train,
  And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,
There's the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,
  And the girl who calls for orders at your door.
      Strong, sensible, and fit,
      They're out to show their grit,
    And tackle jobs with energy and knack.
      No longer caged and penned up,
      They're going to keep their end up
    Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.

There's the motor girl who drives a heavy van,
  There's the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,
There's the girl who cries 'All fares, please!' like a man,
  And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.
      Beneath each uniform
      Beats a heart that's soft and warm,
    Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;
      But a solemn statement this is,
      They've no time for love and kisses
    Till the khaki soldier-boys come marching back.

There is no point in breaking butterflies upon wheels. Yet 'War Girls' does merit attention on sociological grounds, for the skilled way in which it responds to contemporary anxieties. Ought women to tackle male roles? Can they do them well? Will they lose their femininity and become 'like a man'? The poem makes a virtue of necessity, celebrating the war girls' 'energy and knack' and reassuring readers that 'Beneath each uniform / Beats a heart that's soft and warm'. These girls are, of course, the sexual reward for returning soldiers (see the contemporary music-hall songs below), so Pope also stresses that 'They've no time for love and kisses / Till the khaki soldier-boys come marching back.'

But what happens when the men do come back? Love and kisses are all very well, but who takes the job on civvy street? 'War Girls' had already made clear, in a piece of social criticism unusual for Pope's poetry, that gender politics prior to the War had oppressed women: they had been 'caged and penned up'. Never again can that situation be permitted. For all its attempts to allay fears, 'War Girls' exposes a conflict between the rights of women and the rights of soldiers to return to their pre-War jobs. 'Where are they now?', Ivor Gurney would come to ask of his comrades in a poem of 1922, before bleakly answering his own question: 'on state-doles'.

War Poetry during Remembrancetide 2010

2010-11-14T09:52:00.011Z

Please click on the links below. The BBC links will only work for a few more days, and may not be accessible outside the UK. If I missed anything worthwhile, do add it to the comments, and I will update the post.

Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale (BBC)

Battlefield Poet: Keith Douglas (BBC)

Oh What a Lively War: Guillaume Apollinaire (BBC Radio 4 at 4.30pm today, and on iPlayer thereafter)

'The Bugle' --- a newly published poem by Ivor Gurney (Guardian)

John McCrae: 'In Flanders Fields'

2010-11-07T08:59:00.008Z

No better time to discuss John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields' than Remembrance Week, when the poem, or at least a generous excerpt, will be quoted at countless public events across the English-speaking world.

Rarely has the question been asked: how appropriate is the poem to an occasion of remembrance? Or to put it another way, what else might we be submitting to when we submit to this poem? Lest this seem like a finicky concern in the context of overwhelming grief, one fact must be spelt out: in political terms, McCrae could not be more distanced from Owen and Sassoon, whose work 'In Flanders Fields' is often read alongside. And in McCrae's case, the politics shape the poetry; without the politics, there is no poetry. We may not feel obliged to take sides, but an appreciation of these poems must acknowledge that sides have been taken.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
    That mark our place; and in the sky
    The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
    The torch; be yours to hold it high.
    If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
        In Flanders fields.

'In Flanders Fields' is often read without its final stanza in an attempt to shear away the awkward surprise: that this is a recruitment poem. The best parallel may be with the reception of Psalm 137, 'By the waters of Babylon', in which every effort is made to forget that it ends with an infanticidal revenge fantasy: 'Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.'

Sassoon believed, and persuaded Owen, that the War had been prolonged well past its natural course, and had become a war of punishment and conquest. McCrae's poem calls for the War to be prolonged: the dead would not be able to rest if the cause for which they died were betrayed by peace terms. McCrae and Sassoon represented two extremes of a spectrum of opinion among the fighting men: that Germany and her allies should be crushed; and that peace should be negotiated at the earliest opportunity.

My own difficulty with McCrae's poem is caused not by his politics but by the way that that he pressgangs the dead to make his case. 'We are the Dead', his second stanza begins, and the poem puts into their mouths McCrae's own views on the War. The dead are obliged to speak with a unified voice (which is, of course, more than they managed while alive), through which they insist that the living should go on sacrificing themselves in order to keep faith. This is brilliant propaganda: no one would dare argue with those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. 'In Flanders Fields' attempts an outrageous act of appropriation, which insults the very men whom the poem is meant to honour.

Update: Thanks to Ed Leimbacher, who directs me to this site. It publishes more of McCrae's poems, including 'The Anxious Dead', which seeks to allay the fears expressed by 'In Flanders Fields'. The guns will tell the dead that the living have heard their call and 'will not turn aside... till we win or fall'.

Who Chooses the War Poets?

2010-11-05T19:41:00.002Z

is the title of Adrian Barlow's public lecture at the Morison Room of Cambridge University Library on Tuesday 9 November at 5.30pm. Details here.

Next day, Wednesday 10 November at 5.30pm in the Mountbatten Room, Royal Overseas League in London, Richard Duncan will be speaking on 'Kipling in Vernet les Bains, France'.

And on Remembrance Sunday, 14 November, at 4.30pm, Radio 4, Martin Sorrell will be presenting 'Oh What a Lively War' (scroll two-thirds of the way down the link), a programme dedicated to French First World War poet Guillaume Apollinaire. I will be holding forth, alongside Susan Harrow and Brian Turner. Paul McGann will be reading Apollinaire's poetry in translation.

War Poetry Review

2010-11-04T10:15:00.004Z

The new issue of War Poetry Review, the journal of the War Poets Association, is now published. Essays include Jean Liddiard on Rosenberg, Derek Shiel on David Jones, and Stuart Lee and Kate Lindsay on the First World War Poetry Digital Archive. You can view the full list of contents here.

Update: In other news, a conference on 'Tales of War' has been announced to take place in Bucharest next July. I admit that I can't make head nor tail of the Call for Papers: 'As a phenomenological issue, as the privileged subject matter of cultural debates, historiography, theology, philosophy, interpretation strategies and anthropological research the problematic of war appears to illustrate and confirm, beyond Eliade's "terror of history" or Ricoeur's "hermeneutics of suspicion", the correlatives of subjectivity, as well as a richly connotative "existential heritage" of the "fallable man".' Etc.

Ivor Gurney and La Toussaint

2010-10-31T10:38:00.006Z

Ivor Gurney wrote far more poems about 'Toussaints' than any other time of year. I will leave aside the misspelling, and briefly consider why La Toussaint should have been so important for Gurney and (relatedly) why he should have used the French name.

La Toussaint is a much bigger festival in France than in Britain, where Hallowe'en trick-or- treating has almost completely occluded any religious significance. (As a general rule, the more Catholic the country, the more passionate the observance.) In practice, La Toussaint, 1 November, combines All Saints Day and All Souls Day as a jour ferié, or public holiday. Families attend an All Saints Mass in honour of the Catholic saints and of dead relatives.

Gurney alludes to these customs in 'Toussaints', which I publish below. 'Toussaints' is early Gurney, and cannot really be included among his best work despite its occasional power. Gurney mentions 'Toussaints' --- always misspelling it --- in at least another half-dozen later poems, mostly unpublished. The best known, which is in copyright but which can be read in the Collected Poems, is one of his greatest lyrics, 'It is near Toussaints': 'It is near Toussaints, the living and dead will say: / "Have they ended it? What has happened to Gurney?"' Incarcerated in an asylum, Gurney is lost to both living and dead. They 'batter / At doors about the farms crying "Our war poet is lost", / "Madame---no bon!"---and cry his two names, warningly, sombrely.' La Toussaint, then, becomes the day of reunion between the war survivors and the war dead, but that reunion excludes the poet himself, as he remains denied even the revenants' consolations.

Toussaints
(To J. W. H.)

Like softly clanging cymbals were
Plane-trees, poplars Autumn had
Arrayed in gloriously sad
Garments of beauty wind-astir;
It was the day of all the dead---

Toussaints. In sombre twos and threes
Between those coloured pillars went
Drab mourners. Full of presences
The air seemed... ever and anon rent
By a slow bell's solemnities.

The past year's gloriously dead
Came, folk dear to that rich earth
Had given them sustenance and birth,
Breath and dreams, and daily bread,
Took labour-sweat, returned them mirth.

Merville across the plain gleamed white,
The thronged still air never gave a sound,
Only, monotonous untoned
The bell of grief and lost delight.
Gay leaves slow fluttered to the ground.

Sudden, that sense of peace and prayer
Like vapour faded. Round the bend
Swung lines of khaki without end....
Common was water, earth and air;
Death seemed a hard thing not to mend.

Wilfred Owen: 'Dulce et Decorum Est'

2010-10-28T20:31:00.007+01:00

I mentioned in a previous blogpost that the popularity of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' has grown out of all proportion to its merits, and I promised to suggest reasons why that should have happened. The author of 'Miners' (which I have called 'one of the most politically radical poems of [the] age'), 'Futility', 'Strange Meeting' and 'Exposure' is, without question, a major poet. Despite sharing some of his irritation, I don't side with a scholar such as Dan Todman, who has blamed Owen for contributing to the public's distorted understanding of the War: Owen, Dan says, is 'over-rated'. I would rather argue that the distortions come from the reception of his work, and in particular from the valorising of certain poems for political reasons, at the expense of others. The poet who welcomes the War as an opportunity to effect a little useful weeding; the poet who describes the 'exultation' of going over the top and looking back to see the ground 'all crawling and wormy with wounded bodies'; the poet who swears that he will revenge himself against the Germans ('I, Owen, will repay'); the poet who writes with homoerotic passion of exposed and injured flesh; this is not the poet on whom so many school curricula linger.

What, then, explains the pre-eminence of 'Dulce et Decorum Est'? First, it meets one kind of propaganda with an equal and opposite kind. Horace's line is dismissed as 'The old Lie'. Allowing for no complexity, Owen himself is guilty of telling something less than the whole truth: dying for one's country can sometimes seem sweet and decorous, and was described as such by many of his contemporaries. Yet such is the dominance of a particular account of the War that the soldiers at the Front are not permitted to have held different views; or if they did, they were merely fooled by the establishment's discourse. Owen's message is clear and, given what the poem has previously chosen to show us, irrefutable. Outflanked because of our lack of credentials, we do not want to seem like that 'certain poetess', Jessie Pope, whose Horatian delight in battle is founded on ignorance. Who are we to take issue with the suffering soldier-poet about the truth of war?

Owen promises his reader the opportunity to join him as a witness. 'If in some smothering dreams you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in', he writes, and he goes on to describe the scene so that we can see it for ourselves. The poem becomes the smothering dream from which, after our awakening, we can authoritatively dismiss Horace's old Lie. Even while making clear that we can never experience what he has experienced, Owen takes advantage of our desire to understand. We are not like Jessie Pope. We share the poet's pain. When he suddenly interjects, 'Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!', it is as though he is including his male readers in the danger. Poetesses cannot follow him there.

Yet what if we resist those strategies? What if we do not accept the final stanza so passively?

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

This is slack writing. The description of the gassed soldier betrays Owen's reliance on mood-music. We accept that atrocity is being described, and we are expected to become suitably compliant in our appalled response. We take the poet's word for it, because it would be the ultimate act of bad faith to respond differently. Yet bad faith is exactly the problem. Owen fails because his language is too manipulative. As his master, Keats, famously put it, 'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.'

In the final stanza of 'Dulce et Decorum Est', Owen becomes less the reporter and more the propagandist. He reaches for stock images of evil and suffering --- the devil, cancer --- without stopping to consider the appropriateness of the metaphor. What does a devil sick of sin look like? I don't see this image. Cancer is obscene, and so is horrific death in war, but beyond that the simile breaks down instantly: cancer is slow, and death in battle is sudden; cancer is natural, whereas death in battle represents man's inhumanity to man. Far from increasing or conveying the obscenity of the scene, the comparison with cancer only obfuscates. It is a reflex gesture. As for 'innocent tongues', would the cud be any less bitter on other kinds of tongue?

Seamus Heaney has written of his experiences in teaching this poem that 'it seems like an impertinence when we begin [...] to make pejorative critical remarks about the excessively vehement adjectives and nouns... Yet there was obviously an immense disparity between the nit-picking criticism I was conducting on the poem and the heavy price, in terms of emotional and physical suffering, the poet paid in order to bring it into being.' The appeal to, and of, the metatext---that originating event described by the poem---is the reason why war poetry has been simultaneously celebrated and ghettoised. Although it has reached far beyond the poetry-reading coteries, war poetry has always been viewed with suspicion by those canon-forming poets and scholars who detect just this kind of special pleading. As Philip Larkin admitted, 'the temporal accidents of [Owen's] lifetime... make independent critical assessment so difficult.'

'Dulce et Decorum Est' is an uneven poem for reasons which bear our scrutiny. To say so is, in a minor way, to speak the truth to power. There is nothing 'nit-picking' about that. It is tempting to stay silent when a poem supports our prejudices, or when to challenge it would be to challenge our own assumptions. But if we care about Owen's work, and the work of other war poets, then we might at least pay the compliment of questioning it, however uncomfortable that may make us feel.

D. H. Lawrence: 'Bombardment'

2010-10-19T15:57:00.005+01:00

In Kangaroo, D. H. Lawrence remembers watching a Zeppelin raid on London during the Great War. He had seen the Zeppelin 'high, high, high, tiny, pale, as one might imagine the Holy Ghost far, far above.' The metaphor's provocative pairing of the deadly and the divine prepares the way for T. S. Eliot's bizarre and (to my mind) wholly inappropriate attempt, in 'Little Gidding' two decades later, to Christianise the Blitz: a German bomber begins as 'the dark dove with the flickering tongue' before metamorphosing into a 'dove descending' which 'breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror'. The fires of the Blitz become the fires of purgatory, so that 'tongues of flame' are ecstatically 'in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.' 'Little Gidding', as I have argued elsewhere, cannot bear very much reality. For all that it inspires a po-faced High Church sobriety in many of its readers, the transubstantions are a conjuror's trick.

Lawrence succeeds where Eliot would later fail. Eliot's 'dark dove' will be whitewashed into the Holy Ghost descending on the people; Lawrence invokes the Holy Ghost only to point out how tiny and seemingly irrelevant (although potentially destructive) it would seem if it were visible. And in 'Bombardment', the 'dark bird' stays dark and predatorial, hunting out the 'creatures' which it would devour. No opportunity for mystification spiritual communion here, just random and violent death for scuttling, bug-like humanity.

Bombardment

The Town has opened to the sun.

Like a flat red lily with a million petals

She unfolds, she comes undone.

A sharp sky brushes upon

The myriad glittering chimney-pots

As she gently exhales to the sun.

Hurrying creatures run

Down the labyrinth of the sinister flower.

What is it they shun?

A dark bird falls from the sun.

It curves in a rush to the heart of the vast

Flower: the day has begun.

Jon Stallworthy

2010-10-15T16:37:00.006+01:00

Congratulations to Jon Stallworthy, who is the worthy recipient of this year's Wilfred Owen Poetry Award. The prize is intended to 'honour a poet for a sustained body of work that includes memorable war poems'. Jon is the author of many of the finest modern poems about the Great War. As an editor and critic, he has also done more than anyone to promote war poetry. His two-volume edition of Wilfred Owen's poetry set the standard for scholarly editions, and Owen has also been extremely well served by Jon's biography and his trade edition of the poems. Jon's most recent critical study, Survivors' Songs: From Maldon to the Somme, hints in its subtitle at the range of his learning. It is an honour to have been taught by Jon and to have worked with him.

Brian Gardner: Up the Line to Death

2010-10-09T14:42:00.012+01:00

I was at the Bodleian on Thursday and Friday, trying to act like a scholar, and during a quick sortie to Blackwell's I came across a copy of Brian Gardner's Up the Line to Death. Its reissue in 2007 had somehow passed me by, so I now offer the most belated of responses.

Gardner's anthology has one undeniable virtue: first published in 1964, it helped to inspire a renewed interest in the poets of the Great War. Dan Todman has written authoritatively about the ways in which the reading and teaching of Great War poetry became bound up with the anti-Vietnam protests and, more loosely, with a counter-cultural movement which stretched across the latter part of the decade. Gardner was at least partially responsible for creating that possible narrative, in which Great War poetry became cited as evidence proving the wickedness and futility of all wars.

Gardner's introduction runs through a number of myths to establish its case. The fiction that Wilfred Owen kept a collection of 'horror photographs' which he would 'pull out of his pocket and without a word thrust before verbal warriors who had not been in the fighting' is presented as fact. The possibility that soldiers experienced the War in a multitude of ways is quickly disallowed: 'the lice, cold, hunger, fear, wet, and misery were the same', Gardner assures us. And what Gardner calls the 'journey' from the 'idealism' of 1914 to bitterness and anger after the Somme is mapped sketchily but unquestioningly. Gardner selects and regiments his poems so that they will make that particular route-march without the slightest risk of ever straying from the path.

Time is cruel to anthologists because it betrays the limitations of their sensibilities. In this respect, Gardner suffers more than his contemporary, Ian Parsons, whose vastly superior selection, Men Who March Away, was published the following year. Gardner accepts the view that works by Sassoon, Owen and Blunden 'are great poetry in any company', and he acknowledges that 'For the rest, the opinion of the critics seems to have varied widely.' His own opinions are never stated, and can only be guessed at from what is a rather dull and timid selection. Poets such as Edward Shanks, here represented by three poems, have been ignored with good reason by subsequent anthologists. The dozen or so lines from In Parenthesis are better than nothing, but only just. And a comment in the 'Introductory Note' eloquently exposes Gardner's calamitous lack of judgement: 'Lesser-known poems for which I was particularly sorry not to have found room were: 'Death in France' by Carroll Carstairs, 'The Beach Road by the Wood' by Geoffrey Howard, 'After Loos' by Patrick MacGill, 'Private Claye' by D. C. McE. Osborne, and poems by Ivor Gurney.' Gardner can be excused for not having read unpublished work by Gurney, but the thought that the poet of 'Pain' and 'To His Love' has been ignored in favour of slop by Edward Shanks and Robert Nichols is almost unbearable.

Up the Line to Death now possesses only historical interest. A set text for many years in our secondary schools, it symptomised a desire to exploit the poetry of the Great War for political purposes. However noble those purposes may occasionally be, they damage and devalue those writers whose work does indeed amount to 'great poetry in [nearly] any company'.

Update: George Simmers continues the cudgelling here.

David Cameron & 'Dulce et Decorum Est'

2010-09-29T21:26:00.016+01:00

David Cameron's favourite poem, he tells the Daily Mail today, is Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'. Cameron remembers reading Owen's poems for the first time: 'For me, they were literally [sic] an eye-opener and I still find them moving when I read them again today.'

The comments below the article are filled with righteous anger: 'How can a warmonger like Cameron have a favourite anti-war poem?' Leaving aside the obvious retorts --- that it is possible to admire a poem while disagreeing with its politics, or that it is possible to think that Iraq is a just war and that the Great War was not --- this overlooks the poet's contradictions. Owen declared himself a 'conscientious objector with a very seared conscience', his rhetorical flourish camouflaging the emptiness of the phrase. He was not a conscientious objector of any kind.

What is also overlooked is the unsettled complexity of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' itself. To call it an anti-war poem is to state a damagingly partial truth. We might say, more accurately, that it is an anti-pro-war poem. It assaults the rhetoric of the jingoists; it attempts to lay bare the suffering of war; but it does not advocate pacifism or a ceasefire. Its first subject is the problem of representation. Given that language can convey lies about war (vide Jessie Pope, Horace, etc.), what language is capable of conveying the truth? Does such a language even exist? And in this context, what --- said jesting Pilate --- is truth? Claiming that only witnesses can know the reality of war, his poetry must admit its own failure: despite the nightmare scenes described, we cannot share the poet's knowledge. At the same time, Owen's poetry is reluctant to accept that most of the fighting men, fellow witnesses though they were, drew very different conclusions about the necessity of the war.

I hope to return to 'Dulce et Decorum Est', and the reasons why its popularity has grown out of all proportion to its merits, in the coming months.

Update: see here for my account of 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.

Thomas Hardy: 'I Looked Up From My Writing'

2010-09-24T09:58:00.007+01:00

Until Geoffrey Hill started giving voice to his detractors --- 'obstinate old man', 'obnoxious chthonic old fart', 'rancorous, narcissistic old sod' --- the most self-indicting of modern poets had been Thomas Hardy. Both Hill and Hardy embody in their works what Blake called 'The Accuser who is the God of this World'. Hardy's celebrated 'Poems of 1912-13', a series of elegies for his dead wife, vacillates between guilt and excuse, as first the Accuser and then the defence gets the upper hand.

Hardy's 'Poems of War and Patriotism' from his 1917 volume, Moments of Vision, are similarly fraught, although the conflicts tend to take place between poems rather than within them. Decent and dutiful verses like 'Men Who March Away' and 'A Call to National Service' are juxtaposed with poems like 'A New Year's Eve in War Time' describing horrors, griefs and self-doubts.

Among the greatest of Hardy's poems is a lyric titled 'I Looked Up From My Writing'. It is the final poem of the sequence, and it denounces everything which has preceded it. The Accuser wins by pointing out the Neronic culpability of anyone writing poetry in time of war. Or perhaps the poet wins even in the act of condemning himself, because what he does with that accusation---grotesquely, callously, opportunistically, joyously--- is turn it into yet another poem:

I looked up from my writing,
   And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
   The moon's full gaze on me.

Her meditative misty head
   Was spectral in its air,
And I involuntarily said,
   'What are you doing there?'

'Oh, I've been scanning pond and hole
   And waterway hereabout
For the body of one with a sunken soul
   Who has put his life-light out.

'Did you hear his frenzied tattle?
   It was sorrow for his son
Who is slain in brutish battle,
   Though he has injured none.

'And now I am curious to look
   Into the blinkered mind
Of one who wants to write a book
   In a world of such a kind.'

Her temper overwrought me,
   And I edged to shun her view,
For I felt assured she thought me
   One who should drown him too.

Commemorating the Battle of Marathon

2010-09-16T19:23:00.004+01:00

The Battle of Marathon took place on 12 September 490 BC, which makes this blog either four days late or 361 days early in marking the 2500th anniversary.

Now best remembered for Pheidippides' fatal run to Athens with news of the victory, the battle has not been memorialised in art to such effect as its successor a decade later, Thermopylae. Simonides' famous epitaph for the fallen at Thermopylae far surpasses the (Simonidean?) epigram on the Athenians' tomb at Marathon:

Ελλήνων προμαχούντες Αθηναίοι Μαραθώνι
χρυσοφόρων Μήδων εστόρεσαν δύναμιν

Champions of the Hellenes, the Athenians at Marathon
scattered the might of gold-bearing Medes.

Too many proper nouns, I'm afraid.

Among the most renowned of the marathonomachos was Aeschylus, whose gravestone celebrates his prowess in battle and ignores his literary works altogether. He also served in the naval battle at Salamis, which is treated in his earliest surviving play, The Persians, first performed seven years later.

May Sinclair: 'Field Ambulance in Retreat'

2010-09-14T10:06:00.011+01:00

Generally, I dislike poetry anthologies which have too many authors represented by too few poems. One job of a good editor is to be discriminating enough to leave people out. Another is to give a sense of what the best poets sound like. Better to make brave choices by including just a few well-represented poets.

However, now that I am an anthologist-in-the-making, this principle is being challenged. I've stated a case in previous blogposts for various one-poem poets, such as Patrick Shaw Stewart, Julian Grenfell, T. P. Cameron Wilson and Fredegond Shove. The first three of those belong in any authoritative anthology of First World War poetry.

Next up is May Sinclair, better known as a novelist, and still better known---to me anyway---as the unwilling object of the great Charlotte Mew's affections. (Sinclair cruelly reported that on one occasion she 'leapt the bed five times' in order to escape Mew's clutches.) In 1914, Sinclair joined an ambulance unit which went to Belgium to assist the injured and the homeless. She stayed for a month, and her journal, of which there are extracts here, gives a lively description of her experiences. As Suzanne Raitt reveals in this enjoyable article, Sinclair's account may not have been entirely accurate, to say the very least.

May Sinclair remains unknown to First World War poetry anthologies, with one exception. Her poem 'Field Ambulance in Retreat' is included by Andrew Motion in his First World War Poems. That book neatly epitomises everything I don't like about poetry anthologies, but I suppose I ought to be grateful that it introduced me to Sinclair's poem. Even so, I think that the other anthologists were right. Here is the poem, below. Please let me know if you think that it is worth preserving.

Field Ambulance in Retreat
Via Dolorosa, Via Sacra

I
A straight flagged road, laid on the rough earth,
A causeway of stone from beautiful city to city,
Between the tall trees, the slender, delicate trees,
Through the flat green land, by plots of flowers, by black canals thick with heat.

II
The road-makers made it well
Of fine stone, strong for the feet of the oxen and of the great Flemish horses,
And for the high wagons piled with corn from the harvest.
And the labourers are few;
They and their quiet oxen stand aside and wait
By the long road loud with the passing of the guns, the rush of armoured cars, and the
tramp of an army on the march forward to battle;
And, where the piled corn-wagons went, our dripping Ambulance carries home
Its red and white harvest from the fields.

III
The straight flagged road breaks into dust, into a thin white cloud,
About the feet of a regiment driven back league by league,
Rifles at trail, and standards wrapped in black funeral cloths.
Unhasting, proud in retreat,
They smile as the Red Cross Ambulance rushes by.
(You know nothing of beauty and of desolation who have not seen
That smile of an army in retreat.)
They go: and our shining, beckoning danger goes with them,
And our joy in the harvests that we gathered in at nightfall in the fields;
And like an unloved hand laid on a beating heart
Our safety weighs us down.

Safety hard and strange; stranger and yet more hard
As, league after dying league, the beautiful, desolate Land
Falls back from the intolerable speed of an Ambulance in retreat
On the sacred, dolorous Way.

Robert Service: 'Only a Boche'

2010-09-06T19:02:00.014+01:00

The portrayal in verse of the enemy soldier has been one of this blog's recurring subjects. Rarely glimpsed during the First World War, Fritz is most likely to be encountered as a corpse, 'Dribbling black blood from nose and beard', or lying inert while a 'happy warrior' stabs him again and again.

The best time for conversation and reconciliation between warring soldiers is after death. The dead German in 'Strange Meeting' recognises the poem's speaker, 'For so you frowned / Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed'. Similarly, Ivor Gurney imagines in 'The Target' that, if he is killed, he will seek out the man he shot, 'And ask his pardon, if I durst.' After all, as Thomas Hardy had pointed out several years previously, killing someone in war is nothing personal.

Even when Fritz is alive, poets find it hard to muster any animosity towards him. Gurney's own attitudes are complex and shifting, but as I argue in this essay, he reserves his outbursts of rage for letters rather than poetry, and for Germany as a nation rather than for individual soldiers. David Jones goes so far as to dedicate In Parenthesis partly to 'the enemy front-fighters who shared our pains against whom we found ourselves by misadventure'. Resisting all this fellow feeling for the brotherly enemy, the most contemptuous account of Fritz that I have read is given by John Allan Wyeth, whose sonnet, 'Souilly: Hospital', describes how the 'rancid bodies' of POWs inspire his 'dull and cruel laughter'. The greatness of the poem stems from Wyeth's deliberate refusal to offer the sentimental response expected by his readers.

Soldiers sometimes fantasise about killing Germans. Robert Service, like Sassoon, can write poems imagining the joy of bayoneting them --- 'I'm 'untin' for someone to christen me bay'nit', as the charmless speaker of 'My Bay'nit' puts it. However, bloodthirsty rhetoric gives way to compassion when an injured German soldier needs assistance. The title of Service's 'Only a Boche', below, seems increasingly ironic, as the Boche is discovered to be a mirror-image, a married man and a family man with cherubic daughters whose curse it will be to experience their father's death 'again and again'.

Only a Boche

We brought him in from between the lines: we'd better have let him lie;
For what's the use of risking one's skin for a tyke that's going to die?
What's the use of tearing him loose under a gruelling fire,
When he's shot in the head, and worse than dead, and all messed up on the wire?

However, I say, we brought him in. Diable! The mud was bad;
The trench was crooked and greasy and high, and oh, what a time we had!
And often we slipped, and often we tripped, but never he made a moan;
And how we were wet with blood and with sweat! but we carried him in like our own.

Now there he lies in the dug-out dim, awaiting the ambulance,
And the doctor shrugs his shoulders at him, and remarks, "He hasn't a chance."
And we squat and smoke at our game of bridge on the glistening, straw-packed floor,
And above our oaths we can hear his breath deep-drawn in a kind of snore.

For the dressing station is long and low, and the candles gutter dim,
And the mean light falls on the cold clay walls and our faces bristly and grim;
And we flap our cards on the lousy straw, and we laugh and jibe as we play,
And you'd never know that the cursed foe was less than a mile away.
As we con our cards in the rancid gloom, oppressed by that snoring breath,
You'd never dream that our broad roof-beam was swept by the broom of death.

Heigh-ho! My turn for the dummy hand; I rise and I stretch a bit;
The fetid air is making me yawn, and my cigarette's unlit,
So I go to the nearest candle flame, and the man we brought is there,
And his face is white in the shabby light, and I stand at his feet and stare.
Stand for a while, and quietly stare: for strange though it seems to be,
The dying Boche on the stretcher there has a queer resemblance to me.

It gives one a kind of a turn, you know, to come on a thing like that.
It's just as if I were lying there, with a turban of blood for a hat,
Lying there in a coat grey-green instead of a coat grey-blue,
With one of my eyes all shot away, and my brain half tumbling through;
Lying there with a chest that heaves like a bellows up and down,
And a cheek as white as snow on a grave, and lips that are coffee brown.

And confound him, too! He wears, like me, on his finger a wedding ring,
And around his neck, as around my own, by a greasy bit of string,
A locket hangs with a woman's face, and I turn it about to see:
Just as I thought... on the other side the faces of children three;
Clustered together cherub-like, three little laughing girls,
With the usual tiny rosebud mouths and the usual silken curls.
"Zut!" I say. "He has beaten me; for me, I have only two,"
And I push the locket beneath his shirt, feeling a little blue.

Oh, it isn't cheerful to see a man, the marvellous work of God,
Crushed in the mutilation mill, crushed to a smeary clod;
Oh, it isn't cheerful to hear him moan; but it isn't that I mind,
It isn't the anguish that goes with him, it's the anguish he leaves behind.
For his going opens a tragic door that gives on a world of pain,
And the death he dies, those who live and love, will die again and again.

So here I am at my cards once more, but it's kind of spoiling my play,
Thinking of those three brats of his so many a mile away.
War is war, and he's only a Boche, and we all of us take our chance;
But all the same I'll be mighty glad when I'm hearing the ambulance.
One foe the less, but all the same I'm heartily glad I'm not
The man who gave him his broken head, the sniper who fired the shot.

No trumps you make it, I think you said? You'll pardon me if I err;
For a moment I thought of other things... Mon Dieu! Quelle vache de guerre!

There are several versions of Service's Rhymes of a Red Cross Man online, but the most accurate seems to be this one. For Service's place among Canadian war poets, see here; and here is an assessment of another poem from Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.

Forthcoming Events

2010-09-01T08:56:00.008+01:00

Here is a round-up of forthcoming events.

On Saturday 2 October, in Malvern, the Friends of the Dymock Poets will be holding their AGM weekend. Jill Dawson will speak on Rupert Brooke, Jacek Wisniewski on Frost and Thomas, and Jean Moorcroft Wilson on Thomas alone. There will be a literary walk the next day.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson will also be appearing in Bristol on 23 October, alongside Bernard Wynick, Vivien Noakes and Jean Liddiard. Organised by the War Poets Association, the day consists of a conference on Bristol-born Isaac Rosenberg's work and an 'optional walk'.

The Ivor Gurney Society has organised a four-day trip to Ypres, which will include a visit to the newly-raised memorial to Gurney. The trip costs £300 per person, and runs from 7-10 October.

The College English Association of America has announced a call for papers on the theme of 'War and Literature'. The submission deadline is 1 November, for a panel which will take place at the conference in St Petersburg, Florida, on 31 March-2 April 2011.

In other news --- thanks to Philip Lancaster's Herculean efforts, the first part of the Ivor Gurney catalogue has now gone live, and can be searched here.

And finally... a beer brewed to celebrate the life and works of Wilfred Owen has helped to raise £460 for the church in which he served as a lay assistant. No mention is made of the fact that Owen suffered a religious crisis, fell out with the vicar, and left in mysterious circumstances.

'Murder will out, and I have murdered my false creed', he wrote to his mother. We can only imagine what might have been Owen's reaction to the beer's name: Wilfred's Mild.

David Jones: In Parenthesis

2010-08-30T17:46:00.018+01:00

'To attempt to explain, in such a note as this, is futile.' Such was T S Eliot's warning when he added a laudatory introduction to David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937). I see no reason to promise more than Eliot, but in this blogpost I aim to gather some of the online resources which may help to guide readers through what Eliot considered to be 'a work of genius'.

Jones took several decades to find the right form for In Parenthesis. He had served during the War as a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, coming nearest to a fellow poet when (as the two men established many years later) his company once relieved Siegfried Sassoon's. In Parenthesis ends in Mametz Wood, where Jones himself was shot and wounded. After the War, he attempted to convey his experiences through visual art: 'Part of me, the artist within me, has never left the trenches'. But although he excelled as a painter and an engraver, Jones remained dissatisfied with his work until finally inventing a new literary form capable of such a task. The drafts record the drama of that struggle.

It has to be acknowledged that there are two major (and related) obstacles for Jones's audience. In Parenthesis is, from orthodox perspectives, a fiendishly difficult text; and it earns that overused label, sui generis. A contemporary readership is given few if any bearings. What sort of text are we wrestling with? Neither novel nor poem but held in parentheses between them, Jones's hybrid exposes the sameness and formal conservatism of all but a few subsequent writers. That tends not to be a successful career move. Wordsworth believed that great poets create the taste by which they are to be appreciated, and in that single respect, Jones seems to have failed, until now at least. Eliot could optimistically state in 1961 that In Parenthesis would be 'widely enough known in time'. The best reviewers of Jones today (such as David Wheatley and Alex Preston) repeat the mantra that Jones is scandalously neglected, and continue to hope for better.

Perhaps that hope is justified. Jones's work has always attracted a brilliant scholarly cult (although I agree with George Simmers, contra most scholars, that Jones's version of the modernist 'mythic method' is the least interesting thing about In Parenthesis, and blights his later poem, The Anathemata). However, his influence on creative writers has seemed negligible. The most significant exception is (as ever) Geoffrey Hill. A powerful advocate for Rosenberg and Gurney, Hill keeps such silence in respect of David Jones that even the least Bloomian of his readers ought to grow suspicious. A recent lecture by Hill praised Jones in passing, but to date Hill has published virtually nothing on Jones's work, despite passages like this:

The memory lets escape what is over and above---
as spilled bitterness, unmeasured, poured-out,
and again drenched down---demoniac-pouring:
who grins who pours to fill flood and super-flow insensately,
pint-pot---from milliard-quart measure.

This is pure Hill. Proto-Hill, I ought to say. It comes from Part 7 of In Parenthesis.

If Hill's prominence, and our increasing familiarity with his voice, offer one way of approaching In Parenthesis, so much the better. But In Parenthesis comprises multiple voices, sudden shifts in perspective, characters which appear and disappear --- the whole making a 'shape in words' as Jones called it, but a shape the like of which has never previously been encountered.

In Parenthesis has strong claims to be the literary masterpiece of the War. Read it, one part per day for seven days, and don't stop for what you don't understand. Ignore Jones's notes until you read it a second and a third time. Beyond that, I must admit as Eliot admits: 'All that one can say amounts only to pointing towards the book, and affirming its importance and permanence as a work of art.'

Robert Graves in Interview, 1965

2010-08-19T20:59:00.006+01:00

The BBC is currently digitalising much of its vast archive. Amongst the treasures already dug up and put on display has been a number of interviews with modern English novelists, from Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley to Zadie Smith.

Most noteworthy for this blog's purposes is a discussion between Malcolm Muggeridge, at the top of his game, and Robert Graves, which you can see here. Graves is billed as 'the author of I, Claudius', but he takes just a few minutes to dismiss his fiction as the means to an end --- the end being to pay his bills. That is as comfortable as Graves gets; under Muggeridge's deceptively good-natured questioning, his body language betrays a growing unease. When he is asked about his 'homosexual phase', the reaction is excruciating.

Graves starts to discuss his experiences of the Great War, and their lasting effect on him, from about 15.30, announcing that the war was 'marvellous' and explaining why the rates of attrition among officers were so much higher than the lesser ranks endured. He also tells a fascinating story about how he avoided contributing to the prosecution of a 'deserter' who, Graves had been instructed in advance, 'had to be shot in order to support morale'.

T. P. Cameron Wilson: 'Magpies in Picardy'

2010-08-14T11:07:00.011+01:00

My fellow Devonian T. P. Cameron Wilson (1889-1918) belongs alongside Julian Grenfell and Patrick Shaw Stewart as a poet of the Great War who is now remembered for a single poem. Merryn Williams, who wrote a pamphlet about him several years ago, had to search long and hard for a photograph of her subject. I haven't yet seen the book to find out if she was successful.

Wilson published a novel, The Friendly Enemy, which has recently been reissued, and some of his letters appeared after he was killed in France. However, it is the title poem of Magpies in Picardy for which he is known. The internet is no respecter of line breaks; the volume can be found here in a partially mangled state. It was published in 1919 by Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, and Monro's introduction is full of hesitancy: 'His literary talent showed itself precociously early, but afterwards developed rather slowly'. Not surprisingly, the book did not sell well, but Wilson was rescued into semi-obscurity when some poems were included by Lord Wavell in Other Men's Flowers.

Looking through Magpies in Picardy now, it is hard to find much worth salvaging. Hibberd and Onions include 'A Soldier' as well as the title poem in their anthology, and a case could also be made by the generous-spirited for 'Song of Amiens' and 'During the Bombardment' (all of which are strategically positioned near the start of Monro's edition). After that, the quality falls away. A poem titled 'Stanzas Written Outside a Fried-Fish Shop' begins with mesmerising awfulness: 'O Mother Earth! Whose sweetest visions move / Through the blue night in silver nakedness'. It isn't a joke, and it doesn't get better. As for Wilson's attempts at Devon dialect, they are more extreme than anything found in supposedly humorous pamphlets from Dartmoor tea-shops.

And yet... the title poem, 'Magpies in Picardy', is a wonder, with all the strangeness of genius. Monro's edition misses two stanzas which later editors have added and which I include below. The first of them (which is now the penultimate stanza) is the weakest in the poem, and makes no grammatical sense unless considered for upwards of five minutes. (The verb is 'works on', not 'works', and 'the ancient plan' is the subject, not the object.)

Magpies in Picardy

The magpies in Picardy
Are more than I can tell.
They flicker down the dusty roads
And cast a magic spell
On the men who march through Picardy,
Through Picardy to hell.

(The blackbird flies with panic,
The swallow goes with light,
The finches move like ladies,
The owl floats by at night;
But the great and flashing magpie
He flies as artists might.)

A magpie in Picardy
Told me secret things—
Of the music in white feathers,
And the sunlight that sings
And dances in deep shadows—
He told me with his wings.

(The hawk is cruel and rigid,
He watches from a height;
The rook is slow and sombre,
The robin loves to fight;
But the great and flashing magpie
He flies as lovers might.)

He told me that in Picardy,
An age ago or more,
While all his fathers still were eggs,
These dusty highways bore
Brown, singing soldiers marching out
Through Picardy to war.

He said that still through chaos
Works on the ancient plan,
And two things have altered not
Since first the world began—
The beauty of the wild green earth
And the bravery of man.

(For the sparrow flies unthinking
And quarrels in his flight;
The heron trails his legs behind,
The lark goes out of sight;
But the great and flashing magpie
He flies as poets might.)

Gurneyfest

2010-08-11T14:38:00.012+01:00

Gloucester hosts the Three Choirs Festival this year. Ivor Gurney sang at the festival as a young Gloucester Cathedral chorister, so it is appropriate that music by this native son should be well represented in the programme.

The festival sees the world première of Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody, to be performed tomorrow (Thursday 12 August) in Cheltenham by the Philharmonia Orchestra. On Friday, back in Gloucester, the Three Choirs Festival chorus performs Gurney's choral setting of Edward Thomas's poem 'The Trumpet'. It is orchestrated by Philip Lancaster, who discusses both poem and setting here. Gurney's String Quartet in A Major is performed today by the Dante Quartet, along with two songs by Gurney Trustee Ian Venables (who also edited A Gloucestershire Rhapsody along with Philip Lancaster.)

Having been shamefully slow to honour one of its most gifted sons, Gloucester is now making amends with a new 68ft Candle statue, recently installed in the docks, which has lines from two of Gurney's poems at its base. This follows the official unveiling of a blue plaque last September near Gurney's birthplace.

The flurry of activity coincides with the culmination of Philip Lancaster's three-year project to create an online catalogue of Gurney's papers, the first part of which will go live later this week. Philip has been recording progress via his blog, and he gives an account of the importance of Gurney's papers in the University of Exeter's press release here. Philip is finishing a PhD with me at Exeter on Gurney, and he and I are currently working towards a three-volume edition of Gurney's complete writings for Oxford University Press.

A selection of Gurney's manuscripts is on display to the public at the Gloucestershire Archives all week.

Updates from Philip on the week's events can be found here, here and here.

John Gower on War

2010-08-06T19:58:00.008+01:00

Here is the beautifully decorated tomb of John Gower (c.1330-1408), which I came across by chance when I visited Southwark Cathedral this week.

Gower's head is resting, not very comfortably, on his three most important works: Vox Clamantis, Speculum Meditantis, and Confessio Amantis. As the first of these is in Latin, and the second (thought lost for many centuries) in French, Gower's reputation as one of the great Medieval English poets relies on the third: Confessio Amantis. Gower writes in the prologue to the poem that 'fewe men endite / In oure englysshe'. The fact that he chose to do so ensures that, along with his friend Geoffrey Chaucer, he has often been celebrated as a founding father of English poetry.

At 33,000 lines, the Confessio Amantis fully deserves the title of unread masterpiece. It does, however, contain an early account in English of the ethics of war, in the form of a discussion between 'fader' and 'sone' (Bk III, 2200ff). To the question, is it ever allowed to kill another human being, the 'fader' replies with a spirited defence of capital punishment, before moving on to the more problematic subject of war. A man may act in self-defence, he argues, to protect his 'contre', his 'hous' and his 'lond'. But the 'sone' continues to prompt: what about those people who seek 'dedly werres' for worldly ends? This amounts to the 'foule horrible vice / Of homicide', the 'fader' claims, and is explicitly outlawed by Moses. What is more, the birth of Christ coincided with the blessings of angels who brought peace 'to the men of wellwillinge'.

Warming to his theme, the 'fader' lists some of the evils of war, and goes on to explain that those who pursue war for earthly or for spiritual ends will not have their hoped-for 'mede' (reward). They are driven by sin. Quite what King Richard II, who was supposed to have commissioned the poem, or King Henry IV, to whom later editions were dedicated, made of this severe warning is, unfortunately, lost to time.

Bot dedly werre hath his covine
Of pestilence and of famine,
Of poverte and of alle wo,
Wherof this world we blamen so,
Which now the werre hath under fote,
Til god himself therof do bote.
For alle thing which god hath wroght
In Erthe, werre it bringth to nocht:
The cherche is brent, the priest is slain,
The wif, the maide is ek forlain,
The lawe is lore and god unserved:
I not what mede he hath deserved
That suche werres ledeth inne.
If that he do it forto winne,
Ferst to acompte his grete cost
Forth with the folk that he hath lost,
As to the wordes rekeninge
Ther schal he finde no winnynge;
And if he do it to pourchace
The hevene mede, of such a grace
I can noght speke, and natheles
Crist has comanded love and pes,
And who that worcheth the revers,
I trowe his mede is ful divers.
(Bk III, 2267-2290)

Rupert Brooke: 'Peace'

2010-08-05T20:19:00.011+01:00

Away on a research trip, I missed Rupert Brooke's birthday on 3 August, so I offer belatedly his sonnet, 'Peace', by way of recompense. At his best, Brooke was a superb poet, despite the common travesty of his work as foolishly innocent. This was a man who, after all, had fought in the defeat at Antwerp, and witnessed the devastating effects on the civilian population. His sense of duty was born out of experience of suffering and of watching others suffer, not out of ignorance.

Brooke's five sonnets titled '1914', beginning with 'Peace' and ending with 'The Soldier', are acts of persuasion and explication, and as such, their first audience is Brooke himself. More powerfully than any of his fellow soldier-poets, Brooke accounts for his decision to enlist. Compare, on a similar theme, Edward Thomas's revealingly muddled 'This is no case of petty right or wrong', or Wilfred Owen's grand (and nonsensical) self-portrayal as a 'conscientious objector with a very seared conscience'. Brooke's own verse is also marred by rhetorical afflatus, but we hear its faults clearly because we are unwilling to share its assumptions. The vast majority of his contemporaries had no such problem. Brooke's poems were far more popular among soldiers, throughout the war and for decades afterwards, than were those of dissenters like Owen and Sassoon.

Brooke wrote 'Peace' in late 1914 after the evacuation of Antwerp.

Peace

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
  To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
  Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
  And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
  Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
    Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
  But only agony, and that has ending;
    And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

Hedd Wyn and Francis Ledwidge

2010-07-31T07:51:00.008+01:00

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

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

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

After Court Martial

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

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

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

Sassoon so soon

2010-07-28T14:45:00.004+01:00

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

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

Cynthia Wachtell: War No More

2010-07-25T09:14:00.012+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sassoon Exhibition: Dream Voices

2010-07-21T21:19:00.011+01:00

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

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

Fredegond Shove: 'The Farmer, 1917'

2010-07-19T18:47:00.012+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

The Farmer, 1917

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

Rudyard Kipling: 'A Death-Bed'

2010-07-16T08:59:00.004+01:00

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

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

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

A Death-Bed

'This is the State above the Law.

The State exists for the State alone.'

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

And an answering lump by the collarbone.]

Some die shouting in gas or fire;

Some die silent, by shell and shot.

Some die desperate, caught on the wire;

Some die suddenly. This will not.

'Regis suprema voluntas lex'

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

Some die pinned by the broken decks,

Some die sobbing between the boats.

Some die eloquent, pressed to death

By the sliding trench as their friends can hear.

Some die wholly in half a breath,

Some --- give trouble for half a year.

'There is neither Evil nor Good in life

Except as the needs of the State ordain.'

[Since it is rather too late for the knife,

All we can do is mask the pain.]

Some die saintly in faith and hope ---

One died thus in a prison-yard ---

Some die broken by rape or the rope;

Some die easily. This dies hard.

'I will dash to pieces who bar my way.

Woe to the traitor! Woe to the weak!'

[Let him write what he wishes to say.

It tires him out if he tries to speak.]

Some die quietly. Some abound

In loud self-pity. Others spread

Bad morale through the cots around...

This is a type that is better dead.

'The war was forced on me by my foes.

All that I sought was the right to live.'

[Don't be afraid of a triple dose;

The pain will neutralize half we give.

Here are the needles. See that he dies

While the effects of the drug endure...

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

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

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

Miles Jebb: Patrick Shaw Stewart, An Edwardian Meteor

2010-07-13T16:59:00.009+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

Beat! Beat! Drums!

2010-07-08T13:55:00.011+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beat! Beat! Drums!

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

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

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

Sassoonery

2010-07-02T14:23:00.005+01:00

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

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

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

A. C. Swinburne: 'Transvaal'

2010-06-09T13:56:00.012+01:00

I'm starting to think about Boer War poetry for my talk at next week's symposium in Bristol on Kipling's 'The Absent-Minded Beggar'. Kipling supported the Boer War, although he retained a great admiration for 'the Burgher of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony'. After the war he admitted that he was 'almost sorry to see them go under'. But Kipling's primary concern throughout was for Empire, believing it to be a civilising power, and he considered the Boer War a timely warning against national complacency: beforehand, we had been 'bung-full of beastly unjustified spiritual pride as we were with material luxury and over much ease.' Kipling's rage against the Establishment --- the politicians and generals who would betray the nation during the Boer War and fail to heed the warnings in the run-up to the Great War --- predicts the ire directed by the war poets of 1914-18 at the enemy behind the lines.

Kipling is often portrayed as a jingoist by those who have never read him. Yet his Boer War poetry makes him seem like a moderate whose work charts a route between extremists like Hardy, who was denounced as a pacifist for being outspokenly against the war, and Swinburne, whose 'Transvaal' is an exercise in hatred.

Transvaal

Patience, long sick to death, is dead. Too long
Have sloth and doubt and treason bidden us be
What Cromwell's England was not, when the sea
To him bore witness given of Blake how strong
She stood, a commonweal that brooked no wrong
From foes less vile than men like wolves set free
Whose war is waged where none may fight or flee---
With women and with weanlings. Speech and song
Lack utterance now for loathing. Scarce we hear
Foul tongues that blacken God's dishonest name
With prayers turned curses and with praise found shame
Defy the truth whose witness now draws near
To scourge these dogs agape with jaws afoam,
Down out of life. Strike, England, and strike home.

It did not take long for the anti-war movement to respond that the only jaws afoam were Swinburne's own. But such poetry was admired, and could expect to be published in leading broadsheets. Kipling, at other times, was the great writer of hatred, and he did not hold back in his assaults against Germans and Russians. 'Mary Postgate' is one of the most brilliantly vicious stories ever written. Even so, for all his populism, Kipling never sacrificed his art as Swinburne does here. So overwhelmed with fury does the sonnet become that its syntax lapses into incoherence, if not incontinence. Never mind his reputation as a 'braggart in matters of vice': it is his Boer War poetry for which Swinburne deserves vilification.

The War of Fourteen-Eighteen

2010-05-21T14:46:00.005+01:00

A musical interlude from Flanders and Swann. Thanks to Philip Lancaster for drawing my attention to it. Even the puzzled comments on YouTube from Americans (for whom the Great War must, presumably, be the war of seventeen-eighteen) are a delight.

Update: In the comments below, Philip Lancaster mentions the Georges Brassens original. So, compare and contrast:

Isaac Rosenberg in Bristol

2010-05-15T20:26:00.005+01:00

The events are coming thick and fast. Here, courtesy of the War Poets Association, is another one: 'Isaac Rosenberg and Bristol', a 120th anniversary celebration on Saturday 23 October. Already booked to speak are Vivien Noakes, Jean Moorcroft-Wilson and Bernard Wynick. The day will also include 'an optional walk to the venue past the birthplace of Isaac Rosenberg'.

War Poetry Events

2010-05-13T08:57:00.003+01:00

Time for a summary of what is past, or passing, or to come.

You can find a podcast of the Oxford Literary Festival discussion of war poetry here at George Simmers' blog. I feature in it, so I can't bring myself to listen. Also speaking were Jon Stallworthy, Elaine Feinstein, and David Harsent.

Here, courtesy of the University of Oxford's First World War Digital Archive, you can listen to a number of podcasts and lectures, including my own on Ivor Gurney and the phrase 'war poet', which I gave at King's College, Cambridge, last summer.

This weekend, 15-16 May, will see the annual meeting of the Ivor Gurney Society, in Churchdown, Gloucester. On Saturday there will be talks by Roderic Dunnett and Rolf Jordan, and a song recital given by Philip Lancaster (baritone) and Andrew Plant (piano). Graham Middleton leads a 'Gurney poetry walk' on Sunday.

I have blogged already about the forthcoming study day devoted to Rudyard Kipling's Boer War poem 'The Absent-Minded Beggar'. It will take place in Bristol on 19 June. Speakers include Peter Bailey, John Lee, Andrew Lycett, Simon Potter, Edward M Spiers, and yours truly.

The Robert Graves Society will be holding its Tenth International Robert Graves Conference at Mallorca on 6-10 July. A highlight will be a visit to Robert Graves's home, which has been meticulously restored by William Graves and has been open to the public since 2006.

An event is being planned in Cambridge on 20 July to mark the launch of an exhibition devoted to Siegfried Sassoon. Cambridge University Library successfully raised £1.25m to buy the residual Sassoon archive. More details to follow.

Finally, a new war poetry website, with political verse speaking out against the war in Iraq.

The Absent-Minded Beggar

2010-05-12T11:40:00.005+01:00

Rudyard Kipling's Boer War poem, 'The Absent-Minded Beggar', is the subject of a study day at the University of Bristol on 19 June. Speakers include Peter Bailey, John Lee, Simon Potter, Edward M Spiers, Andrew Lycett, and yours truly.

The poem was written to raise money for the families of
soldiers fighting in the Boer War. It proved to be extraordinarily successful, raising more than £250,000 (the equivalent of £14 million today).

The study day will consider the following questions: 'What, though, does it mean when we say that a poem raised £250,000? How does a poem raise money? How did this poem become so immediately famous, nationally and internationally? How long did that fame last, and what were its literary and cultural effects?'

War and Civilization

2010-04-30T15:30:00.004+01:00

Jon Stallworthy sends me details of a forthcoming lecture series at Wolfson College, Oxford, titled 'War and Civilization'. The line-up is extremely impressive:

29 April Niall Ferguson: War and Finance
6 May Geoffrey Hill: War and Poetry
13 May Marina Warner: War and Pity
20 May Ian Buruma: War and Liberation.

The lectures start at 6pm in the Hall of Wolfson College, Oxford. All are welcome.

Charlotte Mew: 'The Cenotaph'

2010-04-15T15:38:00.016+01:00

I have never understood why Charlotte Mew's achievement is so rarely celebrated. She seems to me to have been one of the very great poets of the last century. Bizarrely, her work is more likely to appear in anthologies of Victorian poetry, even though the only book published in her lifetime was The Farmer's Bride (1916, expanded 1921), most of which she wrote after 1912. Defenders of the canon often protest that identity politics should not be allowed to replace aesthetic judgements. Yet here is one of our most important poets, a woman and a lesbian, whose work continues to be overlooked by all sides because it does not lend itself to lazy categorisation.

I once enquired after the possibility of editing Mew's letters. My publisher expressed a keen interest, but the reaction of an existing editor of Mew's work, whose proprietorial senses were outraged, soon dissuaded me. A decade later, the edition which (I was assured) she was already working on seems no closer to being finished. It is a great shame. Mew's poetry is most easily available through a very poor edition by Eavan Boland, the prose is out of print, and most of the letters languish unread. Mew has been badly served, although this valuable website makes some of her work available.

I have blogged previously that Mew wrote three poems explicitly addressing the Great War. They are not quite at the level of a masterpiece like 'Madeleine in Church' (extracts here), but like that untouchably perfect monologue of religious doubt, each challenges and overturns familiar consolatory conventions. The best known of the three is 'The Cenotaph'. As an admissions tutor at Bristol, I used to set the poem as an unseen. The strongest candidates wrote brilliantly about its changing rhymes and rhythms; the worst would seem not even to notice that the lines vary in length from four syllables to 23, so determined were they to escape into a caricaturing account of the futility myth, usually with reference to 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.

The Cenotaph

Not yet will those measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed;
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.
But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column's head.
And over the stairway, at the foot---oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread
Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things
Speaking so wistfully of other Springs
From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.
In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers
     To lovers---to mothers
     Here, too, lies he:
Under the purple, the green, the red,
It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see
Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!
Only, when all is done and said,
God is not mocked and neither are the dead.
For this will stand in our Market-place---
     Who'll sell, who'll buy
     (Will you or I
Lie each to each with the better grace)?
While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's face
As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.

The poet excoriates herself, and at the same time acknowledges her distance: 'it must break some women's hearts'. She and her readers are among the whores and hucksters, horribly captured in that most disgusted of rhymes: buy/I/lie. God is not mocked, Galatians tells us, 'for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap'. Yet here there is no salvatory transformation. We are lost in our money-grubbing littleness, unredeemed by the deaths of those young men. Nor do they find hope of resurrection. The unknown soldier is also Christ, but his 'young, piteous, murdered face' remains unregenerated by spring.

Edward Thomas: 'In Memoriam [Easter 1915]'

2010-04-03T07:51:00.007+01:00

6. IV. 15

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

The manuscript of Edward Thomas's 'In Memoriam [Easter 1915]' reveals that this sophisticated four-line poem has been given its elaborate title by an editor at a later date. '6.IV.15', by comparison, is suitably bare, suitably unembellished, and it seems right for a poem which withholds more than it explicitly voices. We might quibble at the phrase 'call into mind', which may be metrically essential but only at the expense of the more natural (and less clumsily repetitive) 'call to mind'. Otherwise, the poem is a tiny marvel. It moves from abundance ('The flowers left thick') to dearth (the absent men), so that paradoxically it speaks of loss through nature's surfeit. Those men are 'far from home' eschatologically, not just geographically. They are either dead already, or they will soon be dead: they won't be coming back. As I've argued elsewhere, the last twist of the knife comes from Thomas's syntax. In its anastrophic delaying of the negative --- 'and will do never again' instead of the more customary 'and will never do again' --- the poem tantalizes by briefly imagining a replenished future ('and will do'), only to snatch that potential away with emphatic immediacy.

Homosexuals in the Military

2010-03-19T19:05:00.008Z

General Sheehan has made the news today for claiming that, as one headline pithily put it, 'Gay Dutch Soldiers Caused Srebrenica Massacre'. Sheehan argued that European countries which allowed 'open homosexuality' in their military had done so as part of a 'socialisation' process which led to forces being 'ill-equipped to go to war'.

General Sheehan is far too masculine and heterosexual to spend his time reading war poetry. That is a great pity, because were he to do so, he would learn that history is not on his side. For example, the Spartans encouraged homosexual relationships between soldiers because it fostered greater camaraderie on the battlefield. It has even been suggested that the 300 at Thermopylae comprised homosexual couples. Far from being associated with an unwillingness or an inability to fight, homosexuality was considered a vital component in effective soldiering.

The extent of homosociality and homoeroticism in the poetry of the First World War has been well documented. But homosexuality is present from the start in Western depictions of military prowess. When Alexander the Great visited Troy with his intimate friend Hephaestion, they paid homage to the greatest soldier of them all --- Achilles --- by drawing attention to a shared sexuality: 'Alexander garlanded the tomb of Achilles and Hephaestion that of Patroclus, the latter riddling that he was a beloved of Alexander, in just the same way as Patroclus was of Achilles.'

Of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, classical literature leaves us in little doubt. Aeschylus has Achilles ask his lover, 'Does not my holy reverence for your thighs move you, oh you thankless of my frequent kisses?' And it is his love of Patroclus which draws Achilles back to the battlefield in Homer's Iliad. Achilles refuses to fight after Agamemnon forces him to give up his beloved slave-wife, Briseis. However, he becomes enraged at the killing of Patroclus by Hector, and takes his terrible revenge against the defenders of the besieged city. (The closest to a modern parallel would be 'Mad Jack' Sassoon's suicidal rampages through German lines after the death of David Thomas.) General Sheehan might draw some comfort from the fact that Achilles's sexuality plays a role in his downfall. Troilus, fleeing from Achilles's sexual aggression, escapes into a Temple of Apollo, and is there slain by the warrior. Apollo punishes this transgression by guiding the arrow which will penetrate Achilles's heel.

Poetry and War at the Oxford Literary Festival

2010-03-18T12:58:00.005Z

On Friday 26 March, I will be going back to my old college, Christ Church, to take part in a panel discussion at the Oxford Literary Festival. The topic is 'Poetry and War', with fellow panelists Elaine Feinstein, David Harsent and Jon Stallworthy. Francine Stock is chairing the event, which starts at 6pm. See here for tickets and further details.

John Jarmain (slight return)

2010-03-16T10:04:00.007Z

It is a sure sign of John Jarmain's obscurity that a Google search for his name gives one of my earlier posts as its second result. Jarmain has a toe-hold in anthologies of Second World War poetry, but otherwise his Poems are long out of print, and his novel, Priddy Barrows (1944), seems to have sunk without trace. Ian Sales provides a well-judged recent review of Priddy Barrows here. His conclusion that it is not a classic but merely 'a debut novel' which 'promises more than, sadly, Jarmain ever had the chance to deliver' does not inspire anyone to search the web for second-hand copies. Even if they did, they would probably be unsuccessful.

Jarmain's poems deserve a better fate. At his best --- as he is perhaps only three or four times --- he writes poetry which ought to be ranked alongside some of the War's most memorable work. Several of them can be tracked down: 'At a War Grave' (courtesy of Ian Sales again) takes issue with Brooke's 'The Soldier'; his 'Prisoners of War' observes the enemy with a quietude as distant from John Allan Wyeth's 'dull and cruel laughter' as it is possible to imagine; and the poem which still seems to me to be his greatest, 'El Alamein', is here. These may be tiny achievements, but they deserve to last.

Jarmain was a Somerset man, who lived in Pilton and taught at Millfield. The good news is that James Crowden, indefatigable celebrant of the Westcountry in all its aspects (its food, its poetry, its landscapes, its industries, its cider), has plans afoot to publish a book which will incorporate Jarmain's experiences in the Western Desert. Crowden has just written Literary Somerset, which includes as a postscript Jarmain's poem 'Orchids'. With the support of the poet's surviving family, he has tracked down unpublished letters and photographs which will appear in a new book some time during 2012.

Wyeth Redivivus

2010-03-04T09:05:00.003Z

During his lifetime, John Allan Wyeth (1894-1981) won a minor reputation as a painter. As the obituary in the Trenton Times perfunctorily put it, he was a 'noted area artist'. The newspaper can be forgiven for making no mention of Wyeth's poetry: even his close family had no idea that he had published a book of poems, This Man's Army, in 1928. Wyeth is now starting to be recognised as the most important American soldier-poet of the Great War, thanks mainly to the good offices of BJ Omanson and Dana Gioia.

To read some of his poems, see the link above, and here. Gioia's essays are here and here. Here is a good blog post by David Laskin. For insights from yours truly, try these: French brothels, speech rhythms, German POWs. BJ Omanson explains here how he stumbled across Wyeth's work and brought it to prominence.

At last the Americans have found a soldier-poet of the Great War who is strong enough to be ranked alongside the best of the Brits. Whether the attention to Wyeth will peter out, or develop into sustained scholarship, remains to be seen.

John Allan Wyeth: 'Souilly: Hospital'

2010-02-25T12:33:00.013Z

The penultimate sonnet of John Allan Wyeth's This Man's Army, quoted below with permission, typifies that poet's brutal candour. Whether in a French brothel, reporting the obliteration of comrades hit by bombs, or hinting at the onset of the flu epidemic at the end of the war, Wyeth writes with a dispassion more troubling than emotional engagement.

This time, however, Wyeth's encounter with some German prisoners-of-war does provoke an unusually personal response. Soldiers of the Great War fought a largely invisible enemy, which meant that direct encounters with prisoners-of-war inspired shock as well as various more predictable feelings of curiosity, disgust, brotherhood, sympathy, pity and anger.

Here is 'Hospital', from the section titled 'Souilly'.

Hospital

Fever, and crowds---and light that cuts your eyes---
Men waiting in a long slow-shuffling line
with silent private faces, white and bleak.
Long rows of lumpy stretchers on the floor.
My helmet drops---a head jerks up and cries
wide-eyed and settles in a quivering whine.
The air is rank with touching human reek.
A troop of Germans clatters through the door.
They cross our line and something in me dies.
Sullen, detached, obtuse---men into swine---
and hurt unhappy things that walk apart.
Their rancid bodies trail a languid streak
so curious that hate breaks down before
the dull and cruel laughter in my heart.

The first thing I notice is that the poem is astonishingly heavy with adjectives. Count them: 'long slow-shuffling line', 'silent private faces, white and bleak', 'long rows', 'lumpy stretchers', 'cries wide-eyed', 'quivering whine', 'rank with touching human reek', 'Sullen, detached, obtuse', 'hurt unhappy things', 'rancid bodies', 'languid streak', 'so curious', 'dull and cruel laughter'. That is coupled with Wyeth's penchant for sentences lacking an active verb --- he belongs among the most painterly of poets, his eye moving meticulously from scene to scene. (It comes as no surprise to discover that Wyeth was known as an artist in later life.) Here is a poet who wants the precise description, the exact image, and will keep trying until he gets it right. When he does, the effect is unforgettable: 'touching human reek', for example, reanimates the physicality of 'touching' to reverse the word's more usually positive connotations. The 'reek' is so bad that it molests the body.

That assault prepares for the arrival of the German POWs, their own bodies 'hurt' and 'rancid' but their very presence enough to make something in the poet die. It is hate which dies, or which at least 'breaks down', but only to be replaced by a reaction more disturbing: 'the dull and cruel laughter in my heart'. What is the poet laughing at? The absurdity of the war? The absurdity of the Germans' languor? The destruction of any sense of sympathy for the enemy? The fact of the enemy's physical embodiment? Or that their bodies give off an odd smell? This represents --- to use the appropriately German word --- a form of schadenfreude; the dull and cruel laughter is the laughter of the victor over the sullen vanquished. The Germans' presence inspires in the poet something far worse than the simple certainties of hatred.

The Ragtime Infantry

2010-02-16T20:17:00.015Z

Mention Berlin, and many of us will picture things which no longer exist: the Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, Hitler's bunker. 34% of the city's buildings were destroyed during the Second World War, which is why Berlin proves in extremis that cities are palimpsests.

Later this week, my wife will be speaking at an international bat conference, leaving me to tour war memorials and the intriguingly-named Anti-Kriegs-Museum. Here is the soundtrack to the visit:

We are Fred Karno's army, we are the ragtime infantry.
We cannot fight, we cannot shoot, what bleeding use are we?
And when we get to Berlin, we'll hear the Kaiser say,
'Hoch, hoch! Mein Gott, what a bloody rotten lot are the ragtime infantry.'

Julian Grenfell: 'Into Battle'

2010-02-06T14:19:00.006Z

Like his fellow Old Etonian Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Julian Grenfell (1888-1915) is remembered today for just one poem. That poem is 'Into Battle', one of the finest lyrics of the Great War. Yet its reception history has been uneven. Second in popularity only to Brooke's 'The Soldier' during and immediately after the War, 'Into Battle' is now either awkwardly ignored or explicitly condemned. When Jon Silkin included it in his Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, he marked its title with an asterisk in the contents page, explaining that he 'dissented from the implied judgments of taste' of the poem's admirers. At least Silkin was candid. Grenfell is often patronised by those who, wanting all war poetry to sound the same, cannot allow contrary views. They conclude that Grenfell would have come round to their right way of thinking had he lived longer.

Grenfell loved the thrill of battle: 'I adore war. It's like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic... The fighting excitement vitalises everything... One loves one's fellow-man so much more when one is bent on killing him.' He specialised in stalking and sniping, and the same game-book which recorded his partridge-shooting on his parents' estate was used to keep a tally of 'pomeranians'.

Grenfell's war service was brought to a sudden halt in May 1915 when, as he reported phlegmatically in his last letter to his mother, he ‘stopped a Jack Johnson with [his] head’. He died from his wounds a fortnight later.

I take as my text the version published in Elizabeth Vandiver's Stand in the Trench, Achilles, pp. 184-85.

Into Battle

The naked earth is warm with spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
And quivers in the loving breeze;
And life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.

The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth;
Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
And with the trees a newer birth;
And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fullness after dearth.

All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their high comradeship---
The Dog-star, and the Sisters Seven,
Orion's Belt and sworded hip.

The woodland trees that stand together,
They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridge's end.

The kestrel hovering by day,
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they---
As keen of sound, as swift of sight.

The blackbird sings to him, 'Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you will not sing another;
Brother, sing.'

In dreary doubtful waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers;
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!

And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind,
And Joy of Battle only takes
Him by the throat, and makes him blind---

Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.

The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

Elizabeth Vandiver: Stand in the Trench, Achilles

2010-01-29T20:03:00.014Z

Elizabeth Vandiver states in her introduction to Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (OUP, £75) that 'This book's emphasis is on cultural history and the reception history of classics rather than on literary criticism of the poems I discuss. I therefore consider classical reception in poems of extremely varied quality.'

I don't mind admitting that I nearly gave up at that point. Time is too short to be squandered on books which can't tell (or, more infuriatingly, refuse to tell) the difference between good and bad poetry. But I am relieved to have persevered. Vandiver is among the most discriminating of critics, and although she offers a thorough account of the extent of classical learning among very ordinary poets, she also dwells on the greats. 'Rosenberg, Owen, Graves, Sorley and the like do not need my praise', Vandiver asserts; but, despite herself, she gives it anyway. And like any good critic, she reserves her best writing for the best poems.

Vandiver has little truck with the familiar myth that the recruits of 1914-15 were patriotic innocents, and that the War (and especially the Somme) forced them into bitterness and disillusionment. Tracing classical references through the poetry of the War, she is able to show the extent to which Homeric ideals (in particular) sustained soldiers and helped them to make sense of their experiences. Those ideals were sometimes renounced, but the most immediate strength of Vandiver's book lies in its counterblast to those readers who believe that there is only one acceptable response to Horace's infamous line: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Her account of Grenfell's 'Into Battle' is definitive, not least because she is able to point out why the poem's 'Homeric conception of war' made it so popular at the time and so widely derided now. 'Had he lived', writes one critic, 'Grenfell's outlook and his poetry may have changed as disillusion and anger were engendered by protracted trench warfare and needless mass slaughter.' The same is often said about Brooke (for whom Vandiver also makes a convincing case), but these critical orthodoxies are exposed by Vandiver as patronising and wrong-headed. Grenfell's crime is not to think what Owen and Sassoon think. Yet no one ever stops to wonder whether Owen's attitude to the war would have become more positive had he lived to see its successful conclusion.

Occasionally, I don't quite follow Vandiver's argument, as when she overrules her initial reaction to H. W. Garrod's Simonidean 'Neuve Chapelle' in the light of other poems by Garrod. And a wonderful reading of Shaw-Stewart's 'I saw a man this morning' seems finally to go awry in its claim that Shaw-Stewart 'stresses the separation between the poem's speaker and Achilles... [and] recognizes the unbridgeable gap between them.' However, it would be odd if I could find nothing to disagree with in 400 pages of densely argued prose. Vandiver's close readings are superb, and not merely when her extraordinary acoustic memory enables her to tease some classical allusion out of the most unlikely places.

The book is abrim with research about the classical education of public schoolboys. That may sound dryasdust, but it is enthrallingly written and on the sly it provides a fascinating socio-historical account of the making of the officer classes, many of whom 'found in Latin and Greek a lasting source of imaginative inspiration'. Thanks to Owen and Sassoon, it is too easy now to think of that inheritance as foolish, equipping the men badly for the new technological horrors of which Achilles and Hector had no knowledge. Yet Vandiver shows that, for many, Homeric codes survived the shock of the war, and inspired them (as Shaw-Stewart and Grenfell were inspired) under the most terrible conditions. Those codes inspired great poetry, too, and Vandiver's book allows us to hear it clearly above the babble of the disapprovers.

i.m. Keith Douglas (24/01/20---09/06/44)

2010-01-24T18:24:00.007Z

Keith Douglas, what to bring
but empty hands, how to adorn
a skeleton stripped and the polished
stone where lichen fails to cling?
I have seen poems left on graves,
seen photographs, sea-shells, wooden
crosses pinned with poppies,
seen scattered where young actors lie
the bric-à-brac of love, and I
bring nothing and my eyelids itch.

(from 'At Keith Douglas's Grave', Strange Land)

Patrick Shaw-Stewart: 'I saw a man this morning'

2010-01-22T08:44:00.005Z

Elizabeth Vandiver's brilliant forthcoming study, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War, takes its title from the penultimate line of Patrick Shaw-Stewart's 'I saw a man this morning'. I ought to wait until the official publication date (18 February 2010) ticks past before saying very much about Vandiver's book, so by way of drumroll I will focus on Shaw-Stewart's poem. It seems to have been his only poem, found after his death written into his copy of Housman's A Shropshire Lad.

Shaw-Stewart was an Old Etonian, and a Classics scholar of legendary genius. Vandiver makes the point enjoyably and in revealingly excessive detail when she quotes at length a letter which Shaw-Stewart wrote to the most celebrated beauty of her age, Lady Diana Manners. Explaining how Lady Diana might enjoy sexual relations with him while preserving her virginity, Shaw-Stewart has recourse to the Classics, quoting liberally (in what Vandiver calls 'ascending order of erotic satisfaction') various sexual practices as described in Aristophanes, Theocritus and Ovid. It seems that much of this may have been lost on Lady Diana, who did not have the Greek or Latin to be able to translate. Perhaps she asked her parents.

Shaw-Stewart sailed on the Grantully Castle to the Dardanelles with Rupert Brooke, and served in Brooke's burial party. Like many public-school-educated men of his generation, he welcomed the idea of fighting at Gallipoli: 'It is the luckiest thing and the most romantic. Think of fighting in the Chersonese... or alternatively, if it's the Asiatic side they want us on, on the plains of Troy itself! I am going to take my Herodotus as a guide-book.' Shaw-Stewart survived Gallipoli, but was killed in France on 30 December 1917.

Vandiver convincingly dates 'I saw a man this morning' to 13 July 1915, because of the reference to 'three days' peace' on the island of Imbros. Shaw-Stewart was unexpectedly recalled from leave that day, having spent three days on Imbros.

I saw a man this morning
  Who did not wish to die:
I ask and cannot answer,
  If otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning
  Against the Dardanelles;
The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks
  Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting
  Across the Aegean Sea,
Shrapnel and high explosive,
  Shells and hells for me.

O hell of ships and cities,
  Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
  Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland
  And I to Chersonese:
He turned from wrath to battle,
  And I from three days' peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,
  So very hard to die?
Thou knewest, and I know not---
  So much the happier I.

I will go back this morning
  From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
  Flame-capped, and shout for me.

The allusion in the final lines is to Homer's Iliad --- the passage beginning at 18.203 --- in which Athena sets a golden cloud around the head of Achilles and kindles a fire from it: 'He stood there and he shouted... and he raised immense confusion among the Trojans'.

War and Pop Music

2010-01-11T19:37:00.018Z

Prompted by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood visited China in 1937. Isherwood reported from what they hoped would become the centre of the conflict: 'Today Auden and I agreed that we would rather be in Hankow at this moment than anywhere else on earth.' So these soi-disant 'lunatic English explorers' observed a distant replay of the Spanish Civil War, which pitted fascist aggressors against a leftist alliance. The literary product of their journey was the co-authored Journey to a War, an eccentric collaboration between Isherwood's prose, Auden's verse, and photographs taken mainly by Auden.

I have written elsewhere about 'In Time of War', the sequence of 27 sonnets and long concluding 'Commentary' which make up the bulk of Auden's contribution. One sonnet, XXII, speaks pointedly to our own time, its sestet accusing a popular culture which is too frivolous to consider necessary matters:

Think in this year what pleased the dancers best:
When Austria died and China was forsaken,
Shanghai in flames and Teruel retaken,

France put her case before the world: 'Partout
Il y a de la joie.' America addressed
The earth: 'Do you love me as I love you?'

Popular songs, in this case by Charles Trenet and Cole Porter respectively, are seen as conniving in a decadent obliviousness. War is approaching, but rather than paying attention, those 'dancers' succumb to the enticements of cheap music. Rudyard Kipling had made similar complaints during the Boer War, attacking those who 'content their souls' with sporting idols --- 'flannelled fools' and 'muddied oafs' --- while their armies fight abroad.

Does the pop music of the last several decades make any greater recognition of war? I don't mean those protest songs which easily insist that war is bad, but rather songs which take as their subject the experience of war. There are other kinds of popular culture --- film, television, video games --- which lend themselves much more obviously to such an engagement; even so, it would be a serious failure of pop music if it could not accommodate much more than 'Do you love me as I love you?'

If you have any suggestions, please post them in the comments below. Let me start with Marillion's 'Forgotten Sons', a wild concoction of lyrics about the British soldier's experience serving in Northern Ireland. As the title suggests, its point is not that different from Kipling's and Auden's: our soldiers are forgotten by the society which sends them to fight.

Thomas Hardy: 'A New Year's Eve in War Time'

2009-12-30T09:26:00.004Z

Thomas Hardy wrote several New Year's Eve poems. The most famous is 'The Darkling Thrush', which mourns the passing of a year and a century. Hardy is the wintriest of poets, and he tends to see New Year's Eve exclusively as an ending, without looking forward to seasonal renewal. Shelley's question in his 'Ode to the West Wind' --- 'If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?' --- is one which Hardy never thinks of asking. Hardy's failure to believe in the prospect of renewal suits a poetry of old age, a posthumous poetry in which the poet views himself as 'but a dead man held on end'. His agnosticism denies that resurrection must follow death.

'A New Year's Eve in War Time' is collected in the section subtitled 'Poems of War and Patriotism' from Moments of Vision (1917). It is unusual in that it does look forward to the New Year. In fact, the authorial date at the end of the poem ---1915-1916 --- would have the reader believe that it is written either side of midnight. Yet the 'Young Unknown', a potential Christ-figure come to redeem the world --- turns out most likely to be bringing more of the same: more tears, more famine, more flame, more severance, more shock. The poem sits uncomfortably alongside poems like '"Men Who March Away"' and 'A Call to National Service', betraying the hollow rhetoric of those public proclamations.

A New Year's Eve in War Time

I
   Phantasmal fears,
   And the flap of the flame,
   And the throb of the clock,
   And a loosened slate,
   And the blind night's drone,
Which tiredly the spectral pines intone!

II
And the blood in my ears
Strumming always the same,
And the gable-cock
With its fitful grate,
And myself, alone.

III
The twelfth hour nears
Hand-hid, as in shame;
I undo the lock,
And listen, and wait
For the Young Unknown.

IV
In the dark there careers---
As if Death astride came
To numb all with his knock---
A horse at mad rate
Over rut and stone.

V
No figure appears,
No call of my name,
No sound but "Tic-toc"
Without check. Past the gate
It clatters---is gone.

VI
What rider it bears
There is none to proclaim;
And the Old Year has struck,
And, scarce animate,
The New makes moan.

VII
   Maybe that "More Tears!---
   More Famine and Flame---
   More Severance and Shock!"
   Is the order from Fate
   That the Rider speeds on
To pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.

1915-1916.

Thomas Hardy: 'A Christmas Ghost-Story'

2009-12-15T14:08:00.009Z

The Christmas Truce of 1914 brought soldiers together in No-Man's-Land to exchange cigarettes and drinks, play football, sing hymns together, and talk about their families. Christmas is something of an embarrassment for those who wage war: the Tommies and Fritzes who climbed out of their trenches were acknowledging an authority higher than their own military leaders.

Thomas Hardy's 'A Christmas Ghost-Story' is a Boer War poem which sets in opposition the Christian message and the unChristian nature of war. Its publication was enough to outrage the Daily Chronicle, which, with an absence of self-awareness most kindly described as comical, chose Christmas Day, 1899, as the right time to denounce Hardy as a 'pacifist'.

A Christmas Ghost-Story

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,
A mouldering soldier lies---your countryman.
Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans
Nightly to clear Canopus: 'I would know
By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law
Of peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,
Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?
And what of logic or of truth appears
In tacking "Anno Domini" to the years?
Near twenty-hundred liveried thus have hied,
But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.'
Christmas Eve, 1899.

Hardy later allowed the poem to be republished in an anti-war periodical. Quite what the Church made of it, one can only guess, but the poet was not content to leave the matter there. Two months later he reported a conversation with a 'religious man': 'I said, We the civilized world have given Christianity a fair trial for nearly 2000 years, & it has not yet taught countries the rudimentary virtue of keeping peace.'

Yet 'A Christmas Ghost-Story' is a problematic poem. Hardy's prosopopoeia, by which he forces his own political views into the mouth of a dead soldier, is ethically dubious. Compare McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields', from the Great War: McCrae, like Hardy, claims to speak for the dead ('We are the Dead'), yet he burdens them with the argument that the war should be fought to the bitter end lest 'ye break faith with us who die'. Both poems are propaganda, one against war, and one for it, and both enlist the authority of the dead soldier (or soldiers) to protect their own agenda from attack. After all, who would dare argue against those who have made the ultimate sacrifice?

Christina Rossetti: 'In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857'

2009-12-08T12:16:00.011Z

The Jhansi Fort

Events in India during 1857-58 have proved so contentious that even naming them has caused difficulty. Was there a mutiny, an uprising, a rebellion, an insurrection, a war? Indian, or merely sepoy? Wikipedia refers to the 'Indian Rebellion of 1857', whereas Gautam Chakravarty's study of its effects on the British imagination prefers 'Indian Mutiny'.

Writing three or four decades after the violence, Rudyard Kipling referred frequently to the rising as an unforgettable trauma in Anglo-Indian relations. One of his greatest stories, 'The Undertakers', has the Mugger crocodile feeling nostalgic for the rich harvest of that year: 'I got my girth in that season---my girth and my depth'. The Mugger remembers how he 'lay still in the slack-water and let twenty [bodies] go by to pick one; and, above all, the English were not cumbered with jewellery and nose-rings and anklets as my women are nowadays.' When the supply of English corpses stops, the river is empty for a while: 'Then came one or two dead, in red coats, not English, but of one kind all---Hindus and Purbeeahs---then five and six abreast, and at last, from Arrah to the North beyond Agra, it was as though whole villages had walked into the water.'

Here is Christina Rossetti's Indian Mutiny poem, first published in her Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862):

In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857

A hundred, a thousand to one: even so;
  Not a hope in the world remained:
The swarming howling wretches below
  Gained and gained and gained.

Skene looked at his pale young wife.
  ‘Is the time come?’—‘The time is come.’
Young, strong, and so full of life,
  The agony struck them dumb.

Close his arm about her now,
  Close her cheek to his,
Close the pistol to her brow—
  God forgive them this!

‘Will it hurt much?’ ‘No, mine own:
  I wish I could bear the pang for both.’—
‘I wish I could bear the pang alone:
  Courage, dear, I am not loth.’

Kiss and kiss: ‘It is not pain
  Thus to kiss and die.
One kiss more.’—‘And yet one again.’—
  ‘Good-bye.’—‘Good-bye.’

Rossetti appended a footnote in 1875: 'I retain this little poem, not as historically accurate, but as written and published before I heard the supposed facts of its first verse contradicted.' She had discovered (or thought she had discovered) that, far from committing suicide, the Skene family had been captured and killed. There is still no consensus as to their fate. Here is one rather melodramatic Victorian view of the Skenes' demise:

Children and War

2009-11-30T17:49:00.006Z

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

Canadian Poetry from World War I

2009-11-28T13:51:00.012Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alice Meynell: 'Summer in England, 1914'

2009-11-24T10:12:00.008Z

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

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

Summer in England, 1914

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Service: 'Tri-colour'

2009-11-14T18:31:00.013Z

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

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

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

Tri-colour

POPPIES, you try to tell me, glowing there in the wheat;
Poppies! Ah no! You mock me: It's blood, I tell you, it's blood.
It's gleaming wet in the grasses; it's glist'ning warm in the wheat;
It dabbles the ferns and the clover; it brims in an angry flood;
It leaps to the startled heavens; it smothers the sun; it cries
With scarlet voices of triumph from blossom and bough and blade.
See the bright horror of it! It's roaring out of the skies,
And the whole red world is a-welter... Oh God! I'm afraid! I'm afraid!

CORNFLOWERS, you say, just cornflowers, gemming the golden grain;
Ah no! You can't deceive me. Can't I believe my eyes?
Look! It's the dead, my comrades, stark on the dreadful plain,
All in their dark-blue blouses, staring up at the skies.
Comrades of canteen laughter, dumb in the yellow wheat.
See how they sprawl and huddle! See how their brows are white!
Goaded on to the shambles, there in death and defeat...
Father of Pity, hide them! Hasten, O God, Thy night!

LILIES (the light is waning), only lilies you say,
Nestling and softly shining there where the spear-grass waves.
No, my friend, I know better; brighter I see than day:
It's the poor little wooden crosses over their quiet graves.
Oh, how they're gleaming, gleaming! See! Each cross has a crown.
Yes, it's true I am dying; little will be the loss...
Darkness... but look! In Heaven a light, and it's shining down...
God's accolade! Lift me up, friends. I'm going to win—MY CROSS.

Andrew Motion and the 'P Word'

2009-11-09T08:35:00.024Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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