Mentioning the War

Astonishing how many Great War stories can be featured in the news at the same time. As well as Duffy's poem, the recent deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, and the report that DNA techniques will be used to identity bodies found in a mass grave at Fromelles, we have this wonderful series of 'living pictures' made by thousands of US troops in 1918. The Statue of Liberty required 18,000 men. Soldiers forming the tip of the flame were half a mile away from those at the base.

Update: here's another one. The historians aren't going to be happy...

And another.

Carol Ann Duffy's Great War Poem

The BBC has commissioned a poem from the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, to mark the recent passing of the remaining British soldiers of the Great War. It is titled 'Last Post', and you can read and listen to it here.

I'm sure that the poem's motivation is honourable. But it seems to me to be desperately tired in its attitudes and images. Duffy has crossed 'Dulce et Decorum Est' (predictably enough) with Time's Arrow, and tossed in a bit of early Hughes for seasoning. 'That moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud' is pure Hughes --- on a very bad day.

Please tell me why it is a good poem in the comments below.

Update: On their respective blogs, George Simmers and Dan Todman admire the poem, albeit with reservations. They both dislike the allusions to Owen. ('Dulce --- No --- Decorum --- No --- Pro patria mori' makes little sense, beyond indulging in the kind of Horace-bashing which Owen carried out far more memorably.) George notes that there's some confusion over whether the protagonist is a victim of gas or shrapnel. George also thinks that the rewinding is reminiscent of Slaughterhouse Five.

Would anyone like to offer a view on the phrase 'bled bad blood'?

All is Vanity

I founded this blog on 19 January. It took me ten days to add a statcounter. So, I've been keeping a tally for exactly 6 months. During that time, the site has clocked up 15,560 hits from 90+ different countries. The best day was last Monday, 27 July, with 235 hits. The most popular posts have been those on Housman's 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries' and MacDiarmid's 'Another Epitaph...'. By 'popular' I mean unpopular. The post titled 'French Brothels in Wartime' has also attracted a surprising amount of traffic, much of which seems to have been searching only for 'French brothels'. I would like to think that those unsuspecting visitors found more than they'd bargained for in my racy discussion of John Allen Wyeth's radical use of the sonnet form.

To all readers of the blog, whatever your reasons for coming here: many thanks!

First World War Conference at IWM

The International Society for First World War Studies is holding a conference at the Imperial War Museum in London on 10-12 September. Its title is: 'Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War'. Given the focus, it's not surprising that the schedule should be dominated by historians. There doesn't seem to be a paper on poetry.

The society is also establishing a journal, First World War Studies, which has just announced its first call for submissions.

Poems about Iraq and Afghanistan

Today's Guardian carries a number of poems commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy about war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cynical attitude to this exercise would read as follows: some of these poets had not thought to address the issue before, but a request from the Poet Laureate, together with a cheque and publication in the Guardian, are enough to provoke the obligatory hand-wringing. The usual suspects and the usual politics are out in force. (Ian Duhig's poem risks seeming to call the RAF 'Jihadists', but see the comments below.) Duffy says in her introduction that 'British poets in our early 21st century do not go to war'; no, they sit at home writing about it. (There are, contra Duffy, poets who have served in the warzones, but they are silently excluded.) Not one of these poems is news that will stay news; they are soon-to-be-forgotten froth. But the poems aren't really about the poetry; they aren't even about the wars.

All of the above is, I think, true, but it isn't quite the whole truth. Poets are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Rejecting Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie in 1928, Yeats told the playwright, 'you are not interested in the great war; you never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals, and so write out of your own opinions.' None of the poets commissioned by Duffy is interested enough in the wars to visit the warzones in any capacity. (Compare John Balaban, a conscientious objector who spent decades teaching in Vietnam during and after the war there.) But then, few of us are 'interested' enough to do that. Carol Ann Duffy deserves praise for broaching the subject, and her own poem 'Big Ask', while not belonging among her best work, is at least better than Andrew Motion's astonishingly dreadful 'Causa Belli'.

The poetry of the concerned civilian who, nevertheless, leads a normal life in which awareness of the wars plays only a small part is perfectly valid, and is needed. But most poets overplay their hand, insisting that we appreciate their heightened sensitivity to the news bulletins, or that we recognise their special disgust at war. They want to tell us what we already know, but they want to tell us that they know it more than we do. They feel it. Several of Duffy's poets fall spectacularly into that trap. The better poems claim no more than they are entitled to, like Matthew Hollis's Edward-Thomas-inflected 'Landlock', with its cunning reference to 'the uncommissioned sea'. To be commissioned, Hollis hints, is to be tamed. He knows exactly what is expected of him, and resists in the act of accepting.

Two or three of these poets have written about contemporary wars before. Paul Muldoon's Horse Latitudes, for example, gives considerable attention to war in Iraq. Muldoon is an old hand at writing about violence. His two-line poem here ('It's getting dark, but not dark enough to see / An exit wound as an exit strategy') is a frivolous thing, held together only by the heavy play on 'exit', but it does bring to mind a passage from his great poem of the Troubles, 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants':

You could, if you like, put your fist
in the exit wound
in his chest.
He slumps
in the spume of his own arterial blood
like an overturned paraffin lamp.

The voyeurism, the wildly inappropriate language, the artistic delight in figurative possibilities --- this knows the cost of translating atrocity into art, and gives us the full horror unmediated by pity. With the exception of David Harsent, apparently uncommissioned by Carol Ann Duffy despite the success of Legion, no anglophone poet of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has yet come close to that achievement.

Postscript, June 2011: if you are looking for analysis of Jane Weir's 'Poppies', you will find it here.

Does It Matter If Robert Capa Lied?

Robert Capa's 'The Falling Soldier', the iconic image of the Spanish Civil War, has been condemned as a fake. Its provenance had always seemed dubious, but now a new study claims to provide definitive proof that Capa staged the 'shot' many miles from the battlefield.

The Independent's editorial asks the Sassoonish question, 'Does it matter?' Yes, is the answer: 'As a newspaper we adhere to the epiphet that "facts are sacred" --- even in, or especially in, this age of internet virtual reality.' Inevitably, though, self-appointed experts can be found who are prepared to say that it makes no difference whether we are seeing a soldier being killed or an actor performing.

Parvati Nair, Professor of Hispanic Cultural Studies at Queen Mary, confidently asserts in today's letters page of the Independent that 'The photograph does not offer veracity; it offers verisimilitude, the unreal appearance of a reality that is real.' As far as I can follow this blatant pitch for Pseuds Corner, it seems to suggest that propaganda and truth are the same thing, or at least that photo-journalists needn't concern themselves with pesky matters like 'veracity'.

Another of the newspaper's correspondents, John Manning, concurs: 'Even if there are doubts about the authenticity of this "classic image of war", its functional impact surely matters more than to insist that "facts" are "sacred".' Leaving aside the special pleading of 'surely', the scare quotes around 'facts'" tell you all you need to know about that particular propagandist. Who cares about the truth if the 'functional impact' has the desired effect?

It is an issue of ethical importance that a journalist reporting from a warzone should tell the truth. Capa claimed to be telling the truth, and his images achieved fame because he was believed. The evidence now points to the possibility that he lied. The images are cheapened --- trivialised --- as a consequence. The last word must go to Christopher Ricks, a voice of sanity scattering the defenders of the indefensible: 'Would the photograph really have effectively, affectively, the same symbolic implications if Capa had hired an actor for his shot?... We take the force of it because we take the photographer's word for it.'

The Cambridge Companion to War Writing

The Cambridge Companion to War Writing, edited by Kate McLoughlin, is newly published. It comprises 20 essays by leading scholars, the first five of which focus on 'themes' (for example, the historians' historian Hew Strachan on 'The Idea of War'), the next two on 'influences' (classical literature, the Bible), and the remainder on the literature of particular wars from the medieval period to the 'war on terror'. As the presence of Strachan may imply, the contributors make an impressive line-up. My lone complaint is that, if space can be found for two essays on the Second World War (one on the British literature, one on the American), there really ought to be an essay on Shakespeare.

The book kept me company on a long train journey back from Cambridge to Devon. I particularly enjoyed the essays on those topics outside my expertise, probably because the necessity of writing an overview of each war's literature leaves little space for original approaches. But what has stayed most in my mind is McLoughlin's polemical introduction:

'It is vital that techniques and tools are found to represent war accurately: such representation might not stop future wars, but it can at least keep the record straight... In identifying these techniques and tools, literary scholarship has a unique opportunity --- that of constituting an act of good citizenship.'

This is very well said, although I want to know what it entails to 'represent war accurately'. From whose perspective? 'Accurate' representation can easily come to mean, of course, little more than the kind of representation which supports acceptable narratives of any given war.

I was even more taken by McLoughlin's argument that 'each conflict has its own poesis (and, potentially, genre: in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, think of the First World War and the lyric poem, the Second World War and the epic novel, Vietnam and the movie, the "war on terror" and the blog).' Blessed are the scholars whose parenthetical asides are as rich and suggestive as that.

War Poet

The Cambridge conference was hugely enjoyable. I've been to one or two conferences lately where the standard of papers was jaw-droppingly poor. What sort of service do scholars think they're providing when they read their talks, head down, in a mumbling monotone? Or at top speed to cram in as much as possible? To add insult to injury, the worst papers always overrun.

Although train timetables and parallel panels conspired against me, the sessions that I did manage to see in Cambridge were excellent. Subjects ranged from Great War childrearing attitudes, to discussion of musical activities at Ruhleben concentration camp. There were strong poetry talks from Pamela Coren (whose lively determination to dismiss the entire accentual-syllabic tradition at least had the virtue of promoting debate) and John Melillo (on the representation of sound and noise in Great War poetry).

My own talk featured general speculation about the term 'war poetry' and its rise to common usage after 1917, Lord Flashheart's opinions on the war (from 8:05 to 8:20 here), and eventually, a focus on Ivor Gurney's gradual self-designation as 'war poet'.

Above is an envelope from a letter Gurney sent in 1923, the year in which he first applies the phrase to himself. On the back, as you can see, he has written 'War poet'. (What looks like an 's' is in fact a full stop.) According to Philip Lancaster, with whom I'm editing a 3-volume Complete Gurney for Oxford English Texts, this seems to have been an unlikely ruse to get Royal Mail to deliver his unstamped post. It also acts as a seal, pledge and proof of his identity. The war poet is exiled from his republic not (as Plato has it) because he lies, but because he tells a truth which exposes the founding fictions of his society. The more that Gurney calls himself 'war poet', the more he explains the reasons why his nation has betrayed him. By 1925, he is 'First War Poet' -- the pioneer and the exemplar.

Postscript: At the conference the First World War Poetry Archive announced the launch of its Ivor Gurney Collection. This newly available material includes unpublished poems, correspondence, photographs, etc., from the period up to (about) 1921. Highly recommended.

First World War --- Literature, Music and Memory

This weekend, 11-12 July at King's College, Cambridge, the 'First World War --- Literature, Music and Memory' conference will be taking place. You can view the programme here. I'm speaking at 9.15 on Saturday morning. My title: 'Ivor Gurney: First War Poet'.

Update: Read my account of the conference here.